Do the best with what you have in front of you
I was pumped, fully energised and ready to take on the fusty world of test management tools. I’d spent my whole career battling with terrible tools and teams that misunderstood the true value of testing.
Just over a year ago today I shared why I’m building a tech startup for testers. It’s been an incredible journey. I’m still pumped, fully energised and ready to take on a problem.
I talked to many testers in the early days of Qeek and I could sense they could see value. For three months I joined a dev team of an established UK website. Here I used our own product – an incredible way to learn the true value of a product you’re making. Rajit worked part-time and based on our learnings we managed to iterate some fantastic changes. We learnt so much in a very short space of time!
Perhaps our offering at the time didn’t fit all of the requirements of a tester. It’s no surprise that a tester has a lot of requirements – I’m a tester and I do. I realise that a lot of my requirements come down to improving communication. In the past whilst testing I’ve struggled to simplify what I’ve learnt about the product. I’ve raised bugs that weren’t bugs and suggested features that were lost in the ether. I’d given up on sharing my thoughts.
The power of sharing information that’s super clear and accessible leads to immense collaboration with smart decisions. I and others should be able to do this with just the information we have in front of us. I believe teams shouldn’t have to play “what-if” scenarios and feel uneasy about a decision. And individuals shouldn’t feel they don’t have a voice to share their thoughts about improving the product-under-test.
Finance your dreams and the rest will follow
Startups can’t support themselves without cash so we planned to get some. With our product still “in dev” and no per user/per month subscriptions we had to get savvy.
We spent five months building a workshop that helps development teams explore creativity — helping them experiment with multiple product ideas. It is the Tornado Workshop and we successfully sold it to a multi-national. A great experiment that took 100% of our time. Although successful, we didn’t want to commit our future selves to a life of chasing workshop gigs. The workshop provided capital for us to get back to where our hearts and minds belong – our product, Qeek.
We’re slowly honing in on a collaborative manifesto, a way that we believe teams should operate to capture joy in their day to day work life. One key idea is “product intimacy”.
Get intimate with your product
We believe spending quality time with your product is essential. This doesn’t mean creating automated checks and pushing to production when all checks pass. Deeply exploring the value that your product might provide your customers is the exciting part of testing.
Provide individuals with the space to discover and share problems and the team learns as a whole. A team with open channels of discussion is one that can bond over a shared product. There’s no place for silos when a team enables product intimacy.
Version one of Qeek helped testers design and track passed and failed tests. Right now we’re building our second major version of Qeek. Centred around product intimacy and the ability to simplify how learnings are shared amongst the team. We’re extremely excited by the opportunity for everyone in a dev team to get involved in testing. Not just the testers, but developers, product owners, business analysts, designers and stakeholders!
We’re building a tech startup for product makers who want to get intimate with their product.
Thank you for reading our story so far — and thank you for reading what will be my last instalment in this series. We’ve had a huge boost from the interest that we’ve already received and can’t wait to deliver on our promises.
Do you have any thoughts or experiences of getting intimate with your product? What did you learn? How did it affect your product? Have you seen an appetite for product intimacy from non-testers?
<<Read more from the Start-up Series>>
About Simon
Co-founder of Qeek, my mission is to help product makers get intimate with their products and features.
I love tech, music, startups, quality assurance, design, business culture, organisational behaviour and playing the drums. Prior to Qeek I cut my chops in various QA and Dev leadership roles at Rightmove, Gumtree and eBay.
I believe in simplicity, transparency and collaboration.
