The situation
E.ON Next's digital team had 11 product teams and a QA practice that was undervalued, and often seen as the thing slowing releases down.
The problem
- No career structure, so good testers had nowhere to grow.
- Standards varied team by team, and bugs a PM chose not to fix had no route to escalate.
What I did
- Built the backbone: a five-level career path with a management and a specialist track, job descriptions, a skills matrix and a hiring pack, with AI skills expected at every level.
- Promoted a QA engineering manager and a principal engineer, so the function didn't depend on me.
- Set the rules that hold the line: mandatory test sign-off before major releases, an escalation route for serious bugs, and a weekly owner for every customer-facing issue.
- Modernised test automation onto Playwright and Appium, with visual regression in the pipeline.
A QA function that outlasts any single person, and is trusted rather than tolerated.