For eighteen years my job was to find the ways software fails before anyone else did. At Oracle, as a Senior Member of Technical Staff, I led testing and release validation for the database that runs a large part of the world's data — version after version, from 10g all the way to 23ai.
It is precise, unglamorous, deeply technical work, and I loved it. But somewhere along the way a different question started to nag at me. I knew, better than almost anyone, whether a feature worked. I had far less say in whether it was the right feature at all.
That gap is where product lives.
So I made a deliberate move: I started building INUK, and I enrolled in an Executive MBA in Product Leadership to learn properly what I had only ever watched from the quality side. This blog is part of that move — a place to think out loud as I cross from "build it right" to "build the right thing."
I talked through this transition — why I made it, and what it actually feels like — in a recent conversation:
What I'm bringing with me
Eighteen years in QA is not a blank slate. It is a particular way of seeing:
- Respect for what breaks. Every product decision is a hypothesis about reality, and reality is full of edge cases.
- Evidence over opinion. Testing teaches you to distrust the confident claim and ask for the proof.
- The user who isn't in the room. A bug is just a user need that went unmet. Product is the same thing, earlier.
I don't think I'm starting over. I think I'm moving upstream — from catching the wrong thing late to choosing the right thing early.
More on how that's going, soon.