When you are a solo tester on the team, even though you try hard not to but do you become a bottleneck by doing all the testing and everything else by yourself?

What can you do in such situations? 🤔

You can try taking steps to enable the team so you don't become the bottleneck and you don't end up doing everything alone. But are you thinking how is it possible if you are not a lead or manager?

You don't have to be one to enable the team. You can use the following 4 things and build your influence that can help in driving change.

1. Build Your Allies 🫱‍🫲

Get people invested and advocate for yourself. Build that trust so people can believe in you. You dont have to do everything on your own so build those allies.

2. Use storytelling 📖

Be a storyteller when you sharing or proposing new ideas.

• What is the concern?

• Why is it worth discussing?

• How do you plan to solve this?

• What examples or data do you have to show?

3. Build your visibility 🔎

You can build internal credibility by having external visibility. By sharing your external work like blogs that you might have written, conference speaking or anything else that you might have done , build your visibility. If you are like me you might have constant thoughts of feeling like bragging about yourself but if you don't talk about yourself who else would 😉

4. Use feedback as a tool 🔁

Giving and recieving feedback is such an helpful tool that can be used as part of your growth. And also to know the things that you have been trying on team if they are being valuable and helpful to the team. It's about asking the right questions to get constructive feedback so you can find out what worked and what dint work so you can gain confidence, motivation and improvise your approach.

These are few of the things that you can try to enable the team so it can help you drive different experiments around testing and quality. I'll expand on this in the next post.