From Head of QA to Project Manager: Lidia Sinitsyna’s career progression at Adaptive

Recently I made the choice to change my role at Adaptive from Head of QA to Project Management. I wanted to reflect on my career journey at Adaptive so far and show that, as opposed to many other consultancies, Adaptive can be a great place to explore different career paths and opportunities.

My start at Adaptive: building the foundations for QA practice

I joined Adaptive in 2016 as a QA Manager / Head of QA, but in reality, I was also the first QA at the company, and the majority of my responsibilities were centred around the largest project Adaptive had at the time. My first tasks were very hands-on, and my first goals were to define the test strategy, the QA process for this project, the required QA team profiles and also hire my new team ASAP.

Soon enough, new projects started to pop up that needed QA team members, so I expanded the QA hiring process and wrote a QA Quick Start Guide so new joiners could do what I did for my first project and do it faster, bigger, better.

Growing with the company

Here's a thing about me: whenever I take on a leadership role, after the initial phase of learning the ropes and getting things to work, I prepare to leave. Hear me out, I am not a quitter, far from it, but I never want to be the single point of failure. I want to be able to go on holidays, I want things to keep working if I fall ill, I want to be ready for that next promotion 😉. So when it was time to start my maternity leave early in 2018, I could take it and know that the project and the practice would not fall apart in my absence.

Eight months later, I came back, found the project in good hands and could now concentrate on the Head of Practice role while working on smaller projects as QA. I worked with various people in the organization to define our QA Principles, build a QA health-check process for our projects, expand our knowledge base and set up internal knowledge sharing sessions and many other exciting initiatives.

What I loved about my time as Head of QA Practice:

• Clarity in how my work is relevant to the business, close collaboration with everyone from C-suite to marketing and engineering.
• Ability to experiment and show my vision, no pressure to get things right at the first attempt.
• New challenges as we were constantly growing and evolving as a business.

Time for new challenges

The QA practice at Adaptive has now grown to 17 people across all 4 of our offices. We have a streamlined approach to quality assurance all the way from the sales stage to project completion and handover to the client. We plan to keep growing (we are hiring - check our opening roles!)  and that will bring on more new and exciting challenges for the practice. And while I loved my role, I started to feel myself a little too comfortable in it for my liking; it seemed like it was time for a new challenge.

Coincidently last year, I got a chance to try myself as a Delivery Lead in one of our smaller projects. It was not an easy or straightforward journey, but it made me realise that I want to get better at project and delivery management and motivated me to grow in that direction.

I feel very lucky that when I shared my ambition to change the direction of my career with Adaptive, they supported me and gave me the necessary resources to succeed in my next role. I am very excited for this next chapter in my career as well as the new chapter for the QA Practice. I see this move as a great opportunity for us to either promote someone internally to an exciting challenge or bring in a new QA superstar that will take it to the next level.