At the end of each year, I reflect on the entire year and write down everything I did, whether it's wins, achievements, learnings, or challenges(both work and personal). I have been doing this since 2019, which means it's been almost five years now.
My 2024 started with a lot of excitement, curiosity and joy as I stepped into a new role as a quality practice lead. I am really grateful for all the challenges that helped me grow and for all the opportunities that led to my achievements. This year has been particularly special because I've realized how fortunate I am to have an incredible network to learn and receive support from. I want to express my gratitude to my network who have been so supportive and helpful whenever I needed guidance throughout this year.
It was a fantastic start but also an incredibly busy year. I intentionally decided to do less outside of my work, focusing fully on my new role and its demands. This meant attending and speaking at fewer conferences and avoiding taking on any new commitments.
Here are my accomplishments that I'm grateful for in 2024 :
- In my yearly review for 2023, I mentioned that I wanted to focus on more writing and to set the goal to publish at least five blogs in 2024 hoping to reignite my passion for writing. I successfully managed to write five blogs and although it looks like a small number I'm happy that I set this realistic goal and achieved it. I wanted to get into consistent writing habit so I started ship30for30 challenge again. I had previously completed this challenge successfully for 30 days in 2023, but I struggled to maintain the pace and ended up stopping on day 5. I'm writing this as a reminder for my future self that it's okay to stop midway when things are not working that might have worked once.
- I'm a subscriber and regular reader of the Quality Coach Book newsletter by Anne-Marie Charrett. I had the privilege of contributing an article on the topic of "Building Cross-Functional Expertise in a Team." where I talk about cross functional requirements that are commonly referred to as non-functional requirements, which are often overlooked or treated as an afterthought. I shared my experience of a workshop that promotes discussions among teams to achieve a shared understanding of cross-functional requirements and their importance.
- I organised and hosted multiple events at my work as part of an internal quality community focused on various topics of quality engineering. It's not just about having a session on a topic but also to bring people together from different roles including testers, developers, product owners, agilists and platform. I believe this approach is a powerful way to advocate for and influence the importance of quality across the organisation.
- This year I took up an exciting opportunity to support The Test Tribe community who were looking to host meetups in London. Together, we successfully hosted two events featuring sessions by Simon Prior, Lewis Prescott and Afsal Backer. It has been rewarding to help facilitate connections, networking, and learning within the testing community.
- This year, I intentionally scaled back on speaking at many conferences but still had the opportunity to speak at a few.. I facilitated a workshop on Cross-Functional Requirements at TestBash Brighton—a special moment for me as it marked my return to TestBash after five years, and this year it was back in Brighton! I also had the privilege of speaking for the first time at the National Software Testing Conference in London, which I attended alongside my entire team from CFC. I delivered a talk at Women in Silicon Roundabout in London. My talk, titled "Elevate Your Career Through the Power of Networking and Personal Branding," where I shared my personal journey of public speaking and my mentors Angie Jones and Maaret Pyhäjärvi. I emphasized the compound effect of taking one small step at a time and how it can lead to remarkable progress. Delivering this session was a pleasure, and the positive feedback from attendees made it even more memorable.
- Beyond conferences, I participated in several panels, including ones hosted by LambdaTest, Ministry of Testing, and QE Babble. I also delivered a talk on 'A Peek into observability from testers lens' for EasyJet and spoke at CFC’s Quality Engineering Meetup, hosted in collaboration with SauceLabs as part of the CTM London meetup series. I was also invited by Shruti Pandey to join the Testing Roundtable alongside Tooba Fatima. This one is special to me as I got to talk about testing in my native language for the first time(Yayy!)
- This year, I invested my time in reading a lot. Some of the newsletters I looked forward to regularly were by Pat Kua, Alan Page, Simon Sinek, Anne-Marie Charrett, and MoT. I also discovered MasterClass through Ajay Balamurugadas, which offers a variety of excellent courses. I have completed courses by Melody Hobson on "Strategic Decision Making" and Navy SEAL officer Jocko Willink on "Critical Leadership Training". Currently, I am taking Indra Nooyi's course on "Leading with Purpose". I definitely recommend signing up for Masterclass as there's so many various courses with great content with some real experiences shared by industry leaders. (Maybe I should start writing about what I learned from each of these courses)
- I had the incredible opportunity to join a cohort in a leadership workshop facilitated by Lisi Hocke and Shiva Krishnan. I’ve always been deeply inspired by Lisi in so many ways, and so participating in this workshop felt like an excellent opportunity to learn from both of them. It gave me the chance to explore a topic I’m most curious and passionate about right now -leadership, from two amazing leaders. Their insights, experiences, and unique perspectives have already sparked so many thoughts and ideas for me. Maybe it’s time to start writing about what I’ve learned and how it’s shaping my leadership journey!
- I won the "Fletch Cup" within the first six months of joining my current company. This monthly employee recognition award is presented to employees chosen by the CTO, Jon Fletch. Achieving this recognition was a significant accomplishment for me, especially since I had only been working as a Quality Practice Lead for six months at the company. Many of these wins have gone into my brag document, which I keep to myself to remind myself and my future self whenever imposter syndrome visits and sits on my shoulder trying to pull me down. Whenever I'm feeling doubt or low in confidence, I find it helpful to remind myself of my achievements. It's easy to forget our successes while we get caught up in our busy lives. Taking the time to pause, reflect, and acknowledge our wins no matter how big or small can be incredibly valuable. For me, my brag document is my go-to place to revisit those accomplishments and to motivate myself to do more.
- I have been a mentor on ADPList and Mentoring Club for the past couple of years, and I have had the opportunity to mentor and help many people. And I'll continue to do this even more so if anyone is looking for any help or support please feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin and I'll be happy to help if I can, longterm mentorship would be even better. This year, I pursued help by finding a mentor, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have Ajay Balamurugadas as my mentor and coach. He has helped me learn and see things from a new perspective. As a thought leader in testing with many years of leadership experience, Ajay has shared valuable insights with me. (Maybe I can write and share some of the golden nuggets I've gained from him.). I received support and brainstorming help from community friends who were always there when needed and infact we might be planning something for 2025(sharing it already for accountability :D). I have been very fortunate to have had great supportive managers who helped me grow. This year, I am grateful for having mentors and a network who supported me throughout.
This is a brief overview of my year in 2024 a year filled with growth, challenges, expanding my comfort zone(another way of saying getting out of my comfort zone) and learning valuable lessons. Looking ahead to 2025, I want to make some changes, such as speaking at least at two international conferences on a new topic, writing and sharing more consistently, and to invest time in various other activities. This year, I realized that we usually believe we need to cut down on other commitments to focus more on work or new responsibilities. However, this approach can consume and drain all our energy and space, leaving little room for innovation, creativity, and even necessary healthy distractions.
This year taught me a really important lesson, we often feel the need to scale back to commitments to focus on work or new responsibilities.
I've learned or say discovered that when I engage in multiple activities it not only fuels my productivity but also broadens my horizons and keeps me motivated. Personally, I've experienced this when I was doing multiple things like going on testing tours, writing blogs, speaking at conferences, and attending online events to learn from others, exploring new courses on new topics, and engaging in multiple things has consistently helped me achieve more, grow more and stay motivated. I plan to get back to this in 2025.
There are two things that have been on my list for the past two years, so let's see if I can make progress on them this year. I plan to launch a podcast focusing on quality engineering leadership. The podcast will explore leadership in quality engineering, discussing how thought leaders have built quality culture within their organizations and their journeys transitioning from individual contributors to leadership roles. Every time I had planned to progress on this idea, my first thought was(the most common one) that there are so many podcasts out there already so how would this be different and why people should invest their time as guests or listeners(I know I shouldn't listen to these negative inner voices). And the other one was to collaborate with community friends to deliver a joint talk or workshop.
I'm excited to see what 2025 will be like.
