I'm actually starting to think that the PM job should actually be a kind of 'next step up from QA' position, since so many of the skills PMs typically don't have are exactly the kinds of skills that really good QA people do.
Plus, QA really, really, really, really needs to be a profession with good career progression because without career progression you don't have good QA people and without good QA people your product will turn to shit.
Abilities like empathy with users (you get this by being in communication with them, hearing about their problems), ability to tightly specify desired system behavior (you learn this writing bug reports), ability reproduce scenarios, ability to use version control and some basic programming skills.
I think if you had a PM that could write high level failing automated test cases for developers to turn green and submitted them to developers via pull request instead of dumping dead trees on a developer's desk, developers would be in heaven.
I'm actually starting to think that the PM job should actually be a kind of 'next step up from QA' position, since so many of the skills PMs typically don't have are exactly the kinds of skills that really good QA people do.
Plus, QA really, really, really, really needs to be a profession with good career progression because without career progression you don't have good QA people and without good QA people your product will turn to shit.
Abilities like empathy with users (you get this by being in communication with them, hearing about their problems), ability to tightly specify desired system behavior (you learn this writing bug reports), ability reproduce scenarios, ability to use version control and some basic programming skills.
I think if you had a PM that could write high level failing automated test cases for developers to turn green and submitted them to developers via pull request instead of dumping dead trees on a developer's desk, developers would be in heaven.