What does the day to day look like for someone in the QA team?
The day normally starts by checking my meeting schedule, including the regular check-ins like team stand-ups, refinements or retrospectives.
As I currently work within the Support, Infrastructure and Operations team, you need to plan your workload because you need to find those moments of focus throughout the day which allow you to do your regular work.
For a QA Engineer, that normally means tracking workflows and testing features for our products. But, your planned day doesn’t always go as expected – so I try to give myself a little buffer to allow for unexpected bugs that need to be retested, or for some other unforeseen pieces of work like system or tool updates, which are always happening.
What does collaboration between teams look like?
The world we live in now means it’s more vital than ever to be in touch with your team members. The difficulty is that being in person is harder because of the pandemic, so finding other ways of communicating is key – like on Slack or with virtual meetings.
I’m usually speaking and working with colleagues from Product, Developers for Mobile or Backend disciplines. There are channels we always have open and someone is always a few clicks away. Plus, if you don’t know who to speak to, someone on your team will always know who to suggest.
What exciting things are you working on?
There’s been a few things that I’ve already helped deliver in my short time at Moneybox. A recent one that was quite exciting was the direct debit updates for users who want to adjust the account their deposits came in from. We looked to make improvements because it was previously a very manual process.
Because of our work, users can now edit their direct debit details in-app, which is a smoother experience and saves time for our Customer Support team who had to process the updates manually.
The Lifetime ISA withdrawals project also stands out, which has cut down the time for our customers to withdraw money from their LISA for their house purchase. Previously this required a more lengthy process – especially for StockStocks, also known as shares or equities, represent units of ownership in a company. & Shares LISA customers because there were a number of investment sell orders that needed to be manually processed before the money was fully withdrawn.
LISA withdrawals have now been moved in-app, where previously customers would have to call our customer operations team to initiate it. Being able to do this in-app is a much better user experience.
For someone who wants to join the team, what would you recommend in terms of learning and upskilling?
Be prepared to get stuck into tonnes of new things, which can be a great learning opportunity. And remember, don’t place too much pressure on yourself if you don’t understand something straight away.
Pace yourself and aim to absorb small pieces of the puzzle. Soon, whatever you’re stuck on will start to make sense. Plus, the environment and culture at Moneybox is really collaborative, so asking questions and challenging assumptions are both actively encouraged.
What’s the best thing about working at Moneybox?
The people at Moneybox are just amazing. Genuinely. It’s like all the good, smart people were plucked from the same tree. Everyone who works here has the same common goal of helping people to grow their money.
People have come from all walks of life to work at Moneybox, so there’s a massive amount of experience throughout the company – which makes learning a joy. And there’s a fortnightly opportunity to commend colleagues for their work and how they champion our values – which are at the core of what we all believe in.
