There’s a growing trend I’ve seen in several SaaS companies: dissolving the dedicated QA team and shifting quality ownership entirely onto engineers. The promise is seductive—increased velocity, streamlined communication, and a stronger sense of ‘you build it, you run it’ ownership. It’s often sold as the pinnacle of agile efficiency.
But as product managers, we have to ask: what’s the hidden cost? We’re ultimately accountable for the user’s experience, and that experience is deeply tied to product quality. When testing becomes a distributed, secondary task for engineers focused on shipping their part of the code, who is safeguarding the holistic user journey? Who is stress-testing edge cases from a user-centric, non-developer perspective?
I worry we’re optimizing for team output at the expense of user outcome. A faster feature release is a hollow victory if it introduces subtle bugs, degrades performance, or creates a clunky workflow that erodes customer trust over time. We risk becoming ‘feature factories’ that are simply shipping broken promises faster.
So, how are you navigating this in your organizations? For PMs working without a dedicated QA team, how do you ensure quality isn’t just a checkbox, but a core part of the user experience?