Translate a business requirement into a software product or feature
- You have a solid understanding of the business domain of our company. You know what the other departments do, what their main processes and the main points of contacts are and what they use our software for. You are beginning to learn the different vocabulary used for domain concepts by both business and tech teams although it's totally fine to sometimes struggle with it.
- You know how we write user stories or other types of tickets and are able to write tickets of small complexity on your own and you can contribute to medium and larger ones by helping with story writing or clarifying questions. You are learning what kinds of questions developers have when taking on your tickets and are starting to anticipate them when writing tickets.
- You are learning how different ways of describing a feature (textual descriptions, outcome tables, wireframes, diagrams, ...) are suited for different types of problems.
- You are comfortable creating and specifying basic UI / UX designs for topics on our roadmap.
Know the existing product
- You are familiar with all main features of our existing software. You also have some understanding of the lesser used ones. You are able to extend your knowledge about how our software works by yourself.
- You can assist and train our users by answering questions about existing functionality and answer to them whether and how a given task can be performed in our current system.
Know our users
- You continuously talk to and listen to our users to understand their problems and come up with solution ideas.
- You are the voice of our users and represent their interests in the engineering team
Build a product vision
- You are learning the reasons and motivations behind our product design decisions and you are actively catching up with your knowledge about past decisions by asking questions about why things are the way they are.
- You can estimate the business value of a feature request or bug fix and prioritize them accordingly.
Process & Tooling
- You have learned which tools we use for at which stage of our process to communicate with stakeholders and engineers and you use them effectively.
- You can describe the process that a feature takes from the first description of a problem until it is deployed to production.
Know the capabilities of our technology stack
- You are learning what technologies we use for what parts of our stack. You are learning what kinds of changes are easy to do with them and you begin to take this into account when designing features.
- You know the main concepts in our data model and can understand "data model diagrams" (e.g. User has many ScalePriceTariffs).
Structure a large project with all dependencies into manageable parts / deliverables
- You seek out ways in which a story can be broken down into individual smaller deliverables that are already usable and already provide business value and break them down accordingly.
- You actively participate in requirements gathering meetings, take notes and assist with follow-up tasks like clarifying open questions, writing summaries or writing tickets.
- You actively participate in development planning meetings and are able to convey the user's context and problem situation as well as how the intended solution fits the problem.
Estimate and communicate progress and deadlines
- You prioritize and plan features on our roadmap to meet business deadlines. If business deadlines are in conflict with other prioritized requirements you notice these and point them out.
- You communicate the status of requirements and projects proactively to other involved departments, especially when things change.
Quality Assurance
- You perform manual testing on the delivered features and tickets and validate they work as expected.
- You explore many edge cases to make sure the system behaves as expected, even under unusual usage.
Good verbal and written communication
- You write user stories that cover all important aspects of a requirement but are easy to understand and well structured
- You can introduce or describe a feature effectively both to developers and to business stakeholders in their respective languages
Interact well with team members
- You are friendly and pleasant to work with. You can resolve most of the personal conflicts by yourself – by reaching out and suggesting a conversation.
- In your role as QA you often have to critique your colleagues' pieces of work or their choices and priorities. You do this in a patient, constructive and non-confrontational way.
Help improve our team process
- You participate actively in our existing team processes by note-taking, scheduling meetings, and taking on action items from meetings. You document changes in our team process in Don't panic.
Interact well with business stakeholders / customers
- You understand that you are a representative of the IT team and you help creating a positive image of our department.
Help others succeed
- You react to help requests from your colleagues and help them resolve a problem in the area you have more knowledge.
Remote work
- You actively reach out to remote colleagues if you have any questions for them. Other people being remote is not a communication barrier for you.
- When working remotely you actively take part in the communcation with the rest of the team.
Look for and act upon feedback
- When receiving feedback you react to it, learn from it and adjust your future work style based on it.
Handling "being stuck" / time management / following through
- You realize when you need help and ask your team members
Self reflection and continuous self improvement. Awareness of own strengths and weaknesses.
- You have a rough idea of the topics you want to learn and you identify new topics to add to this from your work
- When your task requires new knowledge you are aware that you need guidance and look for it within the IT team
Knowledge sharing
- You are able to share information about how our system works with other team members and other departments
- You can explain how features of our platform works to our users in a way that's tailored to the audience (e.g. by giving release demos to the rest of the company)
Mentor more junior colleagues
- You can help a more junior colleague resolve a particular problem or finish a given task.