After 13+ years in Quality Assurance - leading teams, building automation from scratch -> one truth keeps surfacing: automation is only as good as the mind behind it. In many enterprises, automation engineers simply script already-written test cases. But startups? That’s a different universe. In a fast-paced startup environment, you're not just writing tests. You’re: Manually validating new features before there's any test plan. Automating from intuition and collaboration, not specs. Running performance benchmarks. Raising critical usability issues missed in product reviews. So here’s my question to the QA community:

After 13+ years in Quality Assurance - leading teams, building automation from scratch -> one truth keeps surfacing: automation is only as good as the mind behind it.
In many enterprises, automation engineers simply script already-written test cases. But startups? That’s a different universe.
In a fast-paced startup environment, you're not just writing tests. You’re:
- Manually validating new features before there's any test plan.
- Automating from intuition and collaboration, not specs.
- Running performance benchmarks.
- Raising critical usability issues missed in product reviews.
So here’s my question to the QA community: