QA Engineers vs. Product Owners: Collaboration Over Conflict

Both Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers and Product Owners (POs) are critical but misunderstood positions in Agile software development. QA is defect prevention and product reliability, and the PO is the voice of the customer, business value and feature delivery is their concern. Although they are both striving for the same thing, a high-quality product, on occasion, their point of views conflict.

In spite of that, effective collaboration between QA and PO is not only possible, but it is essential to a successful agile process.

Misunderstanding of requirements is perhaps the most frequent pain area. POs will be thinking at a higher level of abstraction, features and outcomes, whereas QAs are thinking at granular level, analyzing edge cases and system behavior. Unless addressed, this mismatch results in rework, overlooked bugs, or features not meeting business intent. Frequent grooming sessions, quality acceptance criteria, and early involvement of QA can drastically minimize misunderstanding and ease delivery.

Another area of friction is in release planning and prioritization. Product Owners are driven by delivery timelines, whereas Quality Assurance practitioners prioritize stability and risk management. This can appear as conflict; however, it is merely a balance between speed and quality. Promoting the practice of Quality Assurance practitioners to call out risk during sprint planning, along with training Product Owners in fundamental testing practices, ensures respect and shared ownership of product quality.

The key is open communication, empathy, and common objectives. Inviting testers to ask "Why is this feature important?" and facilitating POs to realize "How can we test this effectively?" fosters trust. The QA-PO partnership flourishes when both parties view each other as not blockers, but as collaborators in providing value to the users. Collaborating on acceptance criteria, exploratory testing together, and demo feedback loops are a few collaborative practices that work like magic.

At Certiva QA, we believe collaboration is at the heart of quality. Not only do we train our agile testing team in tools and frameworks but also in stakeholder communication, empathy, and agile thinking. We embed QA Engineers in sprint ceremonies, give them the power to co-own user stories with Product Owners, and use our refreshed 5 Cs—Commitment, Care, Collaboration, Consistency, and Continuous Improvement—as our client success model. To select Certiva QA is not to buy test coverage; instead, it is to collaborate with a team that shares the same language as the product owner while ensuring product quality per sprint. Quality is Our Launchpad.