My Journey

The New Mission

Deputy Head of Engineering meant owning outcomes, not just quality. I was now responsible for 25+ engineers across 3 squads shipping the full Bykea platform — transport, delivery, and partner app.

My responsibilities extended far beyond QA:

• Product innovation (bidding, tipping, missed-call authentication)
• Team performance and squad structure
• Stakeholder management and engineering roadmap
• Community building (Product Soch Cafes)

What Changed in My Thinking

At this level, the bottleneck is never code — it’s clarity. Clarity on priorities, on decisions, on trade-offs. My job became making the path forward obvious so 25 engineers could execute confidently without needing me in every meeting.

This is when I started systematically documenting decisions, writing post-mortems, and investing in the engineering culture as deliberately as the engineering systems.

The Scope Change

Principal SQA meant I was no longer just doing QA — I was designing how QA worked across the entire platform. That included:

• Planning and prioritizing all testing activities across features
• Owning the release sign-off process for all three apps
• Leading daily scrums and sprint ceremonies
• Managing the QA team’s hiring, onboarding, and growth

The biggest learning: communication is a core engineering skill, not a soft skill add-on. Demoing features to stakeholders, managing ETAs, escalating risks — these mattered as much as the technical work.

The ISTQB Initiative

Introduced mandatory ISTQB Foundation certification for the entire QA team. The result wasn’t just better test coverage — it was a shared professional identity. The team started seeing themselves as quality engineers, not testers.

The Technical Challenge

We needed automation that could run on real Android and iOS devices, integrate into CI, and be maintained by engineers who weren’t automation specialists. That’s a trifecta of constraints.

Solution: Appium + Python + Page Object Model + BrowserStack

Python’s readability meant any QA engineer could write and review scripts. BrowserStack gave us device coverage we couldn’t have afforded with an internal lab.

The Trust Problem

The harder challenge was trust. Engineers didn’t believe the automation results when tests failed — they’d assume it was a flaky test rather than a real bug. I solved this by:

1. Making test failures actionable (good error messages, screenshots, logs)
2. Tracking flakiness rates publicly — and fixing flaky tests immediately
3. Never ignoring a failing test, even if it was inconvenient

After 3 months, the team started trusting the green ✅ as much as a human sign-off.

The Culture Shift

Softech was methodical. Bykea was on fire — in the best way. Releases happened weekly. Features shipped fast. User counts were climbing. And the QA process hadn’t caught up.

I had to rewire my thinking: in a startup, speed and quality are not opposites — bad quality is what kills speed.

What I Built in Year One

• Signed off on releases impacting 3M+ users across 3 apps
• Maintained 99.5% production build stability
• Introduced structured defect policies and automation foundations

The real learning was how to prioritize: not all bugs matter equally, and knowing which ones block a release versus which ones can wait is judgment that only comes from being close to the user.

Starting Point

Joined Softech Worldwide as an intern in February 2018, working on VIDIZMO — an enterprise video streaming platform used by Fortune 500 companies. My job was to write TypeScript automation scripts.

What I learned: automation without strategy is just more code to maintain. Good test design requires understanding the user journey deeply.

Earned “Trainer of the Month” recognition in my first year for organizing internal training sessions. Even then, I understood that sharing knowledge multiplies impact.