Senior Test/QA Manager progression journey?

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In the recent years I have seen a lot of adverts for Head of QA or Test Director role but it seems these don’t get filled and adverts lurk around the internet for a long time. Hence it appears recruiters face difficulty in filling these roles or perhaps these are just made up without any proper planning or understanding of the requirement here? In that light I wanted to understand from people who has moved into senior position in their organisations on their experience with senior testing roles. Below are some questions to drive this.

Have you seen progression to director grades from senior testing or QA roles?

If you are in senior testing role and have not yet moved to director or senior leadership role, what do you think are the impediments here apart from politics of-course?

Are roles such as Test Director or Head of QA, relevant anymore? If not then why is this?

What are the impediments you think for a tester to move to senior leadership position in general?

I have seen some instances where people just moved from test manager to project manager roles, which indicates in those instances people may have assumed that there is no progression in Testing or QA as a whole?

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When I was interviewed for a test manager of a team of 10 testers split among 10 different teams, I easily went through the phases of HR, testing, and leadership.
But where I got stuck was the last phase with the IT department lead focusing on management skills:

  • How would you deal with salary raise demands from testers?
  • How would you facilitate the coordination of testers in multi-site and multi-time zones?
  • Are you experienced in large-scale strategy and documentation to align members and have them follow it?
  • Have you driven changes across teams and departments in regard to the testing process to align the processes for the company?
  • Have you led guilds/groups of testing and driving regular meetings and change inside the company?
  • Are you experienced in creating regular presentations and reports to upper management, architects, stakeholders, and department leads, up to the C-level?
    The interviews in this company were focused less on expertise in testing and more on driving positive change and leading people.

If you are in senior testing role and have not yet moved to director or senior leadership role, what do you think are the impediments here apart from politics of-course?
I’ve had an interview to be hired as a senior tester, with the opportunity to manage a soon-to-be-opened testing department. Due to IT manager change, process changes, and budget constraints that never happened.

Most companies I know of, in the small country that I live in now, stop the progression at test lead or manager, their IT department is not growing more than that.

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As @ipstefan also pointed out: when you progress through the ranks, generic management skills are becoming increasingly more important at the expense of being a subject matter expert. Depending on the level and the scope of the new role, there is a tipping point in which the management skills take presence over the subject matter skills.

My number one tip for anyone wanting to grow and progress in their career is to look into those management skills and refine them. This is also not something that is only constrained to QA or testing. Developers and all other kinds of engineers are running into the same issue. I can highly recommend the book The Manager’s Path as it specifically goes into detail on how to handle this journey.

And just to be sure, but if you really like being a subject matter expert, and testing and the practical aspects of QA have your passion, then it’s probably not the best idea to try to become a senior test or QA manager. At that level you are mostly dealing with people problems. And there is a reason why we say: engineering is easy, people are hard.

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hi all,

In the bigger organizations, there is indeed a lever after Senior that is not a management role. The Staff/Principal roles:

I see NO reason why you cannot be a Staff-level tester even in a smaller org.
The experience I have is that you cannot assume worldwide that all testing is done by testers, and that all testers have the same manager. But that’s another discussion … see Where did all the Test managers go?

Read more about staff roles below:

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People are HARD!!

I am not a lead or manager but I often wonder the following:

How do you reward compentent people when there is no budget?
How do you motivate the unmotivated?
How do you help people improve when they are stuck (or not wanting to change)?

I perfectly understand that everyone has their circumstances but some people are just hard to work with, let alone manage. I am going to stay as a individual contributor as long as I can.

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How do you reward competent people when there is no budget?

Listen to them, generally. Passionate people need money but they care about being valued and listened to.

How do you motivate the unmotivated?

Hire better people. People don’t do the right thing, they do what they want. So you have to hire people who want to do the right thing.

Otherwise you have to listen to them and see if you can fix the misalignment.

How do you help people improve when they are stuck

A lot of things, but inspiration is important. Support their visits to meetups and courses and conferences that they want to go to and they’ll come back full of ideas and directions.

(or not wanting to change)?

Any relationship can bend, up until it breaks. If the values no longer align then I’m sorry it didn’t work out. It’s easier to work with people who want to be there, but it’s easier to control people who have to be there. The former will improve your world as you change, the latter will resist it.

some people are just hard to work with, let alone manage

I guess it’s about alignment of goals and values. If we don’t want the same thing we won’t work towards achieving it. And if we differ enough on the means to reach the ends we won’t work towards achieving it.

It’s much like being a DM, I think. Managing expectations, dealing with rules lawyers and murder hobos, adapting the campaign to both your goals/preperation and their desires, managing consent, sustaining morale, creating motivations, working around the rules.

Nerd herding is a responsibility I don’t want.

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Thank you for the insight, @kinofrost.
I especially agree on the misalignment of values, goals, approaches and expectations.

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Thanks ipstefan, hylke, jesper, mtest and kinfrost for your insights so far. I appreciate we are talking about seniority routes in testing and this is included in my original question, but my question also included why QA or Test Managers seem to be stuck most of the times and not progress further, yet you see software development managers progress to Head of Engineering, CTO, Director of Engineering and so on. This has as I mentioned in main question text, put off many good QA managers to move to other roles. You often see Engineer > Senior Engineer > Development Manager > Director > CTO but in case of testing this is currently Tester/Test Engineer > Senior Tester/Test Engineer > Test Lead > Test Manager and thats it.
This should not be the case.

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I don’t have the data to assert what the common progressions of different kinds of roles are.

If what you say is true then it could be a few things, I suppose.

I will replace QA/Test Manager with “tester”, for my own convenience.

I think that it heavily depends on the nature of what a tester/QA/Test Manager really is, the company culture and other contextual concerns. Also on a lack of respect given to testers which may or may not be deserved, or an assumption that testing is about verifying a list of facts and is a low-skill, low-responsibility activity.

There’s a lot of reasons people might choose to stay in a role (passion, expertise, safety, comfort, lack of openings, being uninformed or misinformed about what their role is for), and lot of reasons people might be forced to stay in a role (lack of respect, lack of openings, cost concerns, a tier-based culture, clique egos).

Testers don’t progress?
I’m not sure that this is true. I do know of testers that moved to be project managers, and several that went on to be consultants. It could well be that it depends on culture, industry or country, and your observations are based on sampling from a particular place. Without credible data it’s very hard to say. As one example I worked somewhere that did not have any test engineers, test leads or test managers. Just testers and senior testers (although they operated much the same).

Testers are stuck?
Another question I’d have is if testers feel stuck. I am a tester and my career growth and pay increases came from becoming a better, well-respected and in-demand tester. I had no desire to move to another role. Testing is my passion. Well, science, philosophy, and computers but it’s the same thing. It could be that testers are happy with what they do.

Or it could be that they are constrained by their training or understanding of testing so their skills are only ever applied to shallower work, leaving them no room to move. Or it’s assumed that they are, so are not given the chance to.

Developers move on?
I don’t know that they do. The best developers I worked with had a serious passion for software, languages, design theory, and programming paradigms. They reached a nice and comfortable senior engineer role and stopped, because any other movement would involve no longer doing what they loved and excelled at. Perhaps if we examine it from the position of developers it looks more like they stay still, but if we examine it from the position of CTOs that many used to be developers, I don’t know. It’s certainly true that there are more developer positions in a company than dev managers, project owners, directors and CTOs, so most of them have to stay in development as a matter of numbers.

Opportunity requires respect
I think that testing is considered a less skilled profession than development, and I think that this is mainly due to a lot of testers being trained as tool operators or test case fillers with little experience of taking on the responsibilities of self-management and test strategy. Testing has a dark history of being, essentially, chore-handlers for developers, and this continues to persist, probably because a lot of the biggest training courses for testers are, in my opinion, garbage.

Because it’s hard for testers to grow up and grow out of being in the shadow of developers and prove themselves as free-thinking experts they cannot build their skills, nor be given the freedom they need to work properly as they work under the micromanagement of old systems like large suites of test cases or following management instructions to fill in tedious paperwork. This may result in them being dismissed, or it being assumed that they can only do what developers and managers strictly instruct. If testers are going to become equals in the world of software it will mean moving out of the developers’ basement. A lot of what I do now is aimed at trying to help people to do that.

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Thanks kinofrost, you gave a very valid observation that testers are micromanaged and not given the opportunity to grow since testing is often viewed as a low skilled job that developers can do and can even provide instructions on. Of course, that’s not always the case but I have certainly come across this in my experience. I believe software QA or testing needs to be viewed as an independent function from software development and only then its true value can be realised.