Can you provide examples of how individual contributors can lead?

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Can you provide examples of how individual contributors can lead?

Jesper Ottosen (@jesper) asked this during @shwetaneelsharma’s masterclass webinar: How To Build a Thriving QA/Testing Team With People-First Leadership.

It’s a great question and one that I think folks sometimes struggle with, unsure what they could do with their career if they don’t want to get into a people management/leadership position.

What advice could you share?

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I’d suggest that people who don’t want to go into people management/leadership look at broadening their skillset as well as deepening their strongest areas.

In my case, having been a solo tester for so long, I’ve managed to teach myself a ridiculous amount in the last 10 years:

  • How to install, maintain, and customize Team Foundation Server on premises
  • How to maintain and customize TFS/Azure DevOps
  • How to create and maintain a CI/CD pipeline with TFS/Azure DevOps
  • How to program in C# and F# using Selenium and using Microsoft’s now defunct CodedUI framework
  • How to use Postman including basic test automation
  • A whole lot of writing in the form of company-format use cases, user guides, internal how-tos and so forth
  • How to maintain the team wiki - not to mention creating an equally massive amount of team documentation that resides on said wiki
  • Installing, configuring and maintaining the data pumps that sync between TFS and Rally (since our product management uses Rally)
  • Learning how to program to an API then wrestling with the TFS API to build something that reports automated test results the way I want them shown
  • Writing a number of articles for the MoT
  • Learning enough about security testing to stumble over a big security hole and do basic sanity checking for security ever since
  • Volunteering to pick up some of the more routine administrative tasks for my manager (who is currently team manager, tech lead, and program manager and as such has way too much to do)

This is all in addition to the normal testing duties, of course.

Someone who is sufficiently experienced with the company software can act as a mentor to help onboard new development team members - the knowledge of which parts of the system are particularly troublesome and other quirks of the software can be invaluable to a new developer.

I’ve taken the perspective of “If it will help and I can do it, I’ll just do it.” and it’s paid off in terms of the things I’ve learned along the way. Right now my biggest hassle is figuring out how to translate all this into resume-friendly descriptions!

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Congrats on all you’ve achieved, @katepaulk. And thanks for sharing. Inspiration for folks who aren’t going down the people management/leadership route.

What you’ve described reminds me of the “comb-shaped” term for a person’s skill set. Go wide with the essentials, and make the comb wider as you pick up new skills. Some teeth of the comb are longer/deeper.

Wonder if you could visually represent this with what you’ve shared? :thinking:

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I had that question for many years, as I didn’t want to end up in a manager position, but I was feeling like I couldn’t progress in leadership in QE if it wasn’t that path. Until the company I’m working with now.
They offer us 2 paths, the management path, and the IC path, where you can go all the way to Principal without managing people (where I’m at now). I love this, as it has allowed me to grow as a lead without having to be a manager.

Myself (principal) and our Leads in Quality Engineering that are in the IC path have a focus on working with teams to improve things like wide test strategies, introduction of new test frameworks and approaches, coaching and mentoring, look at current challenges or problems and bring solutions, etc.

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