QA Manager
A QA Manager leads a testing team — setting test strategy, managing people and priorities, coordinating with engineering and product leadership, and owning quality outcomes at an organizational level rather than executing individual test cases day to day.
The shift from individual contributor to QA Manager is largely a shift from technical execution to people and process leadership — hiring and developing testers, setting the team's overall test strategy and tooling direction, and representing quality concerns in cross-functional planning and roadmap discussions.
A strong QA Manager still needs enough technical grounding to make credible decisions about test strategy and automation investment, but the role's core value is organizational: balancing testing thoroughness against delivery speed, advocating for quality practices across the wider engineering organization, and being the person accountable when quality outcomes fall short.
