From QA Engineer to Head of Quality: My 10 Years at Ninja Van
A candid look at the promotions, mistakes, and turning points across a decade building quality culture at one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing logistics companies.
A Decade in the Trenches
In 2016, I joined Ninja Van as a junior QA Engineer. We were a small engineering group squeezed into a cramped office, shipping code at breakneck speed. There were no test suites, no release gates, and "quality assurance" was mostly checking things manually before a release.
Over the next ten years, I grew alongside the company. I moved from building automation test frameworks from scratch, to managing a single product line, to overseeing multiple QA teams, and eventually leading the entire Quality department.
Here are the key lessons I learned along the way:
1. Automation is a Culture, Not a Tool
When we started, we thought installing Selenium and writing scripts would solve our release problems. It didn't. We ended up with thousands of flaky tests that everyone ignored. I learned that test automation only works when the entire engineering team owns it and values the test signals.
2. Transitioning to Management Requires Letting Go
My hardest transition was in 2020 when I became QA Manager. I wanted to keep writing code and refactoring test suites. I had to learn that my output was now measured by my team's capability, not my individual commits.
3. Quality is More Than Bug Detection
As Head of Quality, my focus shifted from finding bugs to optimizing cycle time and feedback loops. A team that can release safely in 15 minutes with minor errors is often more productive than a team that takes two weeks of rigid testing to ship a "perfect" release.