A solid quality bar with no one steering it.
We already have shared standards, working quality gates, and AI tooling in the mix. What’s missing is someone whose job is to look at all of it, decide what needs to improve next, and actually drive that improvement instead of it being everyone’s part-time responsibility.
A QA squad with no dedicated leadership.
Our QAs already organize horizontally across teams, but every one of them is focused on their own team’s work day to day. Nobody has the bandwidth to unify how they work, spread what’s working on one team to the others, or represent their pain points where decisions get made. You’ll give that squad the structure and leadership it’s missing.
Standards that need continuous R&D, not a rewrite.
The foundation works. The risk is standing still while the org grows. You’ll keep pushing the state of the art, testing new approaches and tools, and deciding what’s worth rolling out broadly versus what stays an experiment.
Quality work that’s still someone’s side project.
Right now, improving quality practice competes with each QA’s day-to-day team commitments. You’ll make it someone’s actual job to carry that forward, and get engineers, EMs, and PMs treating it as planned work instead of something squeezed in.
What Success Looks Like (Year 1)
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A clear quality vision, owned and communicated: Every product team can point to what “good” means for their testing and why, with you as the person who set that direction and keeps it current.
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Measurable improvement on existing gates: Flakiness, pipeline cost, and what runs sync versus async on core repositories are visibly better than when you started, not just maintained.
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At least one new AI-native capability shipped: You’ve pushed the existing AI tooling forward with something new, like an added test-generation flow or audit, that engineers actually reach for weekly.
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A QA squad that feels led: The QAs across teams can point to concrete ways their work, tools, or standards improved because someone was finally driving it.