I once had a job working in support at a movie theater point-of-sale company. Half of it was answering the phone. The other half was QA and writing Jira features, which sounds like two unrelated jobs and isn’t.
When you sit with the email chains and the calls, you hear customers describe their constraints in their own words: before anyone has tidied them into something with acceptance criteria. Later, reading a well-curated user story, I knew what it had been built out of. Somebody had done that listening first. The story was the output, not the input.
That QA work led directly to a QA job at a banking CRM company, and those two years did as much for my product instincts as my testing ones. Every Tuesday at 8am I demoed testing to the product owner. Not a status update: a demo, weekly, to the person who owned the thing. You find out quickly which questions are worth their time and which ones you should have answered yourself.
I also started writing wikis for the product. Those stuck, and became part of how the company explained itself to itself.
That habit is still running at my current job. It shows up in wikis, and in proposals: an “Outlier” analytics view, a “Time Machine”, a CatBoost model I prototyped to forecast adjustment codes and pricing, a test-data generator that uses real medical codes, a set of UI changes that surface insights people were deriving by hand, an MCP skill built on a Claude Artifact.
My favorites are the pipelines. Vitest for React helper logic. Bruno for black-box integration testing. WebApplicationFactory for white-box smoke tests inside the DI container.
One of the best feelings in this job is watching something you started as a single 1 = 1 assert
grow into a suite of hundreds, because other people kept reaching for it. You wrote four lines. The
suite isn’t yours anymore, and that’s the point.
What I keep coming back to is that the help you can give product is limited mostly by your own imagination and preparation. There should be more collaboration between the technical side and the business. They own the workflows and the domain language. We work inside it every day and watch how it behaves for actual users. Nothing prepared me for that better than QA, and honestly, support before it. There’s a common-sense muscle that builds through those interactions, and it raises quality everywhere: not just in the tests.