Managing a Remote QA Team
Lessons in Raising the Bar
During my time leading a distributed QA team across the U.S. and India, I had the opportunity to work with a dedicated and talented group of engineers. While the collaboration across time zones was productive and often inspiring, it also revealed some key challenges - especially around maintaining consistent quality standards.
Great Team, But Growing Pains
The engineers I worked with overseas were skilled and enthusiastic, always delivering on their assigned tasks. However, I noticed a pattern - they sometimes became complacent with their testing. The definition of “done” didn’t always include deep scrutiny or thinking beyond pass/fail criteria.
One Bug That Changed Everything
There was a particular moment that crystallized the issue for me. I discovered a bug where a critical button wasn't visible in smaller-resolution browsers. When I brought it up, the team admitted they had seen it - but chose not to report it because, in their words, “it wasn’t breaking anything.”
That moment shifted our entire approach. I reminded the team that just because something isn’t technically broken, doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. If users can’t see a button, they won’t click it - and that’s a functional failure, not just a UI glitch.
Raising the QA Standard
In response, I introduced “UX flags” to our testing process and implemented #UXflags in Jira tickets. I began holding weekly bug retrospectives. We focused on thinking like the end user - questioning visual hierarchy, accessibility, and usability in every test run. Over time, I saw a major shift: the team became more proactive, caught edge cases independently, and started reporting issues from a user-first mindset.
Takeaway
Managing a remote QA team goes far beyond assigning tickets. It requires cultivating a culture where quality is everyone’s responsibility - not just checking boxes, but caring about the final product. That button bug may have seemed minor, but it taught us a major lesson: high-quality software comes from high-quality thinking.