Abstracts

Spotify famously developed an engineering culture that garnered significant attention; many teams tried to emulate it, but only a few succeeded in adopting it. It emphasised creating “squads” and breaking down teams. Initially, I was excited to see the Spotify model in action, but ultimately, I realised that it fosters a narrow vision, particularly for testers, leading to shallow testing.

The Spotify model offers high autonomy but lacks a collaborative and guided process. We need independence- not just autonomy- to deliver customer value and validate insights from a tester's perspective. Working in isolated pieces and silos without appreciating the bigger picture results in significant wasted time and unshared knowledge.

Meeting customer expectations is crucial for attaining customer satisfaction. However, ensuring we meet their needs can be challenging with ever-changing customer expectations. While some may believe that meeting customer requirements alone is sufficient for customer satisfaction, the truth is that it is not always true.

No matter how carefully we design, develop, and test our products, people will always find ways to deviate from the happy paths we lay out for them. It becomes even more complex when the teams built them in isolation. To create high-value features that truly resonate with customers, we need to shift our focus and testing strategies towards delivering the desired customer experience, seeing the product as a whole. This requires a deep understanding of customer behaviour, feedback, emotions, and feelings.

Testers can develop a keen interest in the product and the customers themselves. They seek to understand why decisions are made and how people use the product, and they enjoy being involved in making product choices that enhance customer satisfaction. Understanding the customer and user journey provides us with infinite opportunities to test and explore the product. It enables testers to trust their intuition and comprehend the design with the perspective of a user engaging with it.

We need a core framework that allows us to be "product-customer minded" and strategies to follow and understand the "why" behind it. By deep-diving into this area, we can explore how to bring more business value and accelerate delivery cycles by systematically shifting our perspectives.

From this session, you will learn how to understand customer value, deliver customer value faster, strategise to maximise product impact through product-minded testing approaches, build an experience strategy that acts as a framework to aid testing, and discover a framework for testing high-value features.

Key takeaways:

• Assess the importance of delivering customer value faster.
• Outline how to strategise to maximise efficient product impact by testing approaches.
• Construct a framework for testing and delivering high-value features.
• Design an experience strategy that acts as a framework for being a product-minded tester to see the holistic picture.