What’s up Product Hacks fam. It’s your favorite product email of the week where we cheer on the builders! The product managers or entrepreneurs that are grinding daily to build great products that SELL! Let’s dive in!

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What is QA and what are the best practices?

Question and answer? Nope. Quilting Association? Closer. QA or Quality Assurance testing is the process of ensuring that your product is of the highest possible quality for your customers. QA is simply the technique used to prevent issues with your software product or service and to ensure a great user experience for your customers. In other words, it’s a critical step that you don’t want to miss or you’ll look like an idiot when your product goes to market. Kind of like that scene in Hot Rod where they didn’t QA check the take-off ramp. “Ben, what the hell are you talking about?”

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If that video doesn’t make you want to QA test, I don’t know what will. Thank you Andy Samberg for teaching us a valuable lesson.

Now, many Product Managers and Entrepreneurs out there skip the QA testing step, especially in early-stage companies or products. Why? It takes time, it often takes money, most early-stage companies don’t have the budget to hire a full or part-time QA engineer, and frankly, it’s just a pain in the ass.

For those of you out there that are QA neigh sayers raising your pirate flags shouting “users should test product”, “let the product fail and iterate in agile”, I get you folks! Trust me. My wife is a QA engineer. That means everything in our home goes through a QA check. “Ben, are you sure you locked all the doors and windows?” “Ben, it looks like you didn’t get this dish 100% clean.” “Ben, this piece of flooring you installed looks to be .04 degrees off.” Anyways…

While we may dislike these QA checks, they ultimately save us in our product releases. When I think of QA, I think of the trust that is being maintained by the end-user or client. Trust that the product will work. Trust that the product won’t be buggy and has been put through its trials. Trust is one of the biggest arguments I make for having a QA engineer in the mix when it comes to building or iterating on a product. Now let’s get into some tools and tactics for doing QA successfully!

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1. Set testing goals and requirements — Aimlessly testing everything isn’t the most efficient methodology in my experience. Get specific:

• What are the clients/users goals?
• What are the testing priorities (you as the PM should help provide these)
• How will reporting be done?

2. Combine automated and manual testing — What’s the difference here? The biggest difference between manual and automation testing is who executes the test case. In manual testing, the human tester does it. In automation testing, the tool does it. The robots have yet to rise and take over so let us make sure we keep human eyes on the product for the time being.

3. Perform frequent regression testing — Really important! Regression testing is testing the new features you worked on in the production environment and making sure they didn’t impact the rest of the product. This is often a huge step that is missed! Just because your test environment worked, doesn’t mean the production environment will work. Kind of like when I tasted my cookie batter, gave it a thumbs up, and then didn’t taste the baked cookies. I proceeded to give them to my guests and then they never tasted my cooking again. Don’t worry I still have friends (I think).

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4. Use shift left testing — I highly recommend it! This approach entails starting the testing process early in the development process. This means the QA team is involved in the earlier stages of development than in traditional methods like waterfall, when testing activities begin only after the development stage is over.

Why do I love this so much? Identifying and eliminating bugs at the early stages of the development process is so much cheaper than at the final stages, when development is almost complete. According to IBM, discovering bugs after release may be up to 30 times more expensive than discovering them in the design phase. Save that money!

Some of the dozens of subscribers reading this, may already have a QA engineer or QA team working with you. This is very prevalent in larger software companies.

For product managers and/or entrepreneurs out there that are looking for a QA solution but don’t know where to start, I have some recommendations for you:

1. Toptal — Great resource to not just hire awesome developers but also equally as good for hiring great QA engineers. Their claim to fame is they have the top 3% of freelance talent on the market. I’ve used Toptal and have had a great experience.
2. testRigor — Best for next-generation no-code automation for manual QA with minimal maintenance.
3. Testim — Testim is a low-code tool with a modern, intuitive UI. Tests are created with a Chrome extension that records a user’s actions. Tests can be edited in the Testim visual editor to rearrange steps, create reusable groups that are shared across tests, add assertions or code-like functions, including loops, and conditions.

The standards for products are so high today in both the B2B and B2C worlds. This has made QA testing that much more imperative to a product operation. Get your QA tests in check and look like a pro in your product releases!

Design Matters

It’s that time when I get to share my favorite design find of the week! Look at this… <insert Ben drooling>.

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So simple. So clean. Yet I love the unique style the four designers from Ukraine took in putting this together.

Other things I love:

• This is a UI template designed in Photoshop that you can use.
• They use the font Poppins throughout the UI which is a personal favorite (writing this newsletter in Poppins right now).
• Medium fidelity wireframes — ready-to-use components and templates.

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Who could have thought that looking for real estate could get sexier! Event after the Zillow SNL skit.

Check out the project on Behance!

Product Love

¿Puedes decir Duolingo?

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Duolingo is definitely a product that inspires me almost as much as Taylor Swift. Duolingo is a global language learning app that uses gamification to make language learning accessible and fun for millions of people across the world.

Why I love this product:

1. I love the playful and engaging nature of Duolingo’s design.
2. They have their UX dialed to an absolute science.
3. Their AI engine is amazing. Duolingo uses something called spaced repetition. This is a learning technique that leverages a memory phenomenon called the spacing effect. This describes how our brains learn more effectively when we space out our learning over time. Learning is a lot like building a brick wall; if you stack bricks up too quickly without letting the mortar between each layer set, you’re going to have a pretty sh*tty wall. Spacing learning allows that “mental mortar” time to dry. Duolingo has essentially embedded this technique into the user experience of the app. This means that it is technically impossible for a user to engage in binge learning and get tired quickly. Wish they had spaced repetition for my drinking in college to avoid hangovers…

I think what is most impressive is how Duolingo found such a strong brand identity for a truly global audience. Not easy with 50 million users.

Fun fact: The Duolingo design team is so popular they have their own Instagram account! Check it out.

This Edition Of Product Hacks Is Brought To You By:

Me! No cool sponsors this week for the dozens of readers. So you all get our hero, Mr. Elon Musk, because his products go to space and that’s where our logo is from.

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About The Writer:

Ben Sampson is a product nerd and current co-founder at WeHero. He has built 4 companies in the past 10 years, and worked as a consultant for 4 years helping some of the largest companies in the world like Bloomberg, Dun & Bradstreet, etc. make some of the best products in company history.

Yes, I wrote this in 2nd person because it just sounds sooo much cooler! See you all on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: I don’t pay an editor to review my writing. If I made a typo you can publicly humiliate me on Twitter. If you find any of my writing too direct or unprofessional, god made an <unsubscribe button>.

It actually wasn’t a god. Just some guy named Jared Dunn.