Reflections on 1:1s across the business

This year I started doing my first 1:1s with colleagues, aside from those with my manager/leader. It was a really interesting experience and I wanted to reflect on it a little.

Getting going

It was actually something that was on my agenda for a while but struggled to get permission / buy in to do it. I had previously had a couple of “one off” 1:1s when doing my scouting so I felt confident they had value. Consequently when I switched to be part of a specific team I just went ahead and booked them, promising to reduce them after a few goes to not be taking up too much of people’s time.

My first session with someone always had similar questions. I wanted to understand what quality meant to them, where they feel strongest and weakest and where they’d like to grow. If it was an area where I could help, I would. If I couldn’t directly help, often just chatting and giving space for these conversations helped. In time I’d then be talking about projects, asking about quality and testing challenges whilst trying to tap into what really affected people.

It is worth calling out that in my view quality is part of everything we do. Are you interested in clean code? That is quality. Are you interested in how to get more performance out of a GPU? That is quality. Just as me being interested in exploratory testing is quality.

Things that I’ve learnt

First of all, they were excellent for myself. More so than retrospectives and group sessions as you can really spend the time talking about specific topics. If I have ~5 minutes of 12 people’s time then I’ll learn some surface level issues, including getting distracted by less relevant topics. However give me 20 minutes of 3 people’s time and I’ll get some really great insights, “wasting” just as many dev hours. Whilst many would want quantitative data to lead their decisions, having this qualitative data is fantastic and should never be overlooked.

My second learning, which I knew in advance but had to get better with it, was the art of shutting the hell up. I could talk and ramble for hours on quality & testing but that wasn’t the point. I got more from the sessions when I let the other person talk more and only really spoke to ask questions to probe further or when I had advice/insight to offer… or occasionally just to be reassuring.

I was usually very clear with people when I was doing this “coaching” approach. I feel that this transparency is useful. I’ve been in several 1:1s where I’ve came out wondering why I was being asked these questions or why our conversation tone was different. This is why I wanted to make it clear that I’m here as a coach to listen, ask questions and hopefully we both learn.

On that, my final learning was that developers definitely took something from our conversations. A few developers have told me that they really value the 1:1s as its an opportunity to talk about topics that they wouldn’t normally discuss. In fact even POs, managers and UX were positive in their response to our conversations.

My point here is that I learnt that my value as a Quality Coach was at times at its greatest when I get the opportunity to talk 1:1. People from different roles will get value from talking about topics that are really important to building quality software but are rarely afforded to them.

Summary

Whilst arguably more “difficult” to get developers & other roles engaged in quality and testing than working with a specialist, it is arguably more invaluable because even. Quality covers so much more than testing and as quality specialists it is important to work with people throughout the organisation.

I really hope that my next role gives me the opportunity to coach and talk quality with people beyond those who labelled as testers or quality engineers.