Test Leadership Congress 2020

I once had to ask a student "Why is there a marble in your nose?" This question was a learning experience for me, as it led me down a path of questions I hadn't thought to ask before and revealed that the real challenge wasn't the stuck marble - it was that the student had outgrown naps and needed something productive to do while his classmates were sleeping!

People in tech come from a wide variety of backgrounds, which often influence how we carry out our roles. For instance, the skills involved in helping children transition smoothly from recess to naptime enabled me to successfully lead department-wide process changes. My experience teaching math to elementary students with an "I do, we do, you do" approach has helped me coach software engineers learning a new testing tool. And of course, my experience with the marble taught me the importance of asking questions and applying my curiosity, which has made me a better advocate for users and engineering teams.

Every experience matters! We all bring a variety of expertise and lessons learned from previous roles or industries, which allows us to think outside the box and challenge the status quo. It helps us include perspectives that might otherwise be lost or overlooked. Having a wider breadth of experience and knowledge makes us better at our jobs, and I hope that my talk inspires the audience to understand how their previous jobs have impacted and improved the way they work in software and technology.