Doing whatever the team needs…

By achakmakjian | Posted on October 10th, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, New England Patriot Troy Brown retired from football after playing his whole career with the Patriots.  For me it was a bittersweet announcement as I felt it was coming sooner or later, but I kept up hope that he’d get one more year.  I think he was the greatest Patriot player ever, and one of the best team players in NFL history:  Guys who play more than one position, who play wherever the team needs them at the time.

There have been other players who did this in their careers.  In different decades, Deion Sanders, Jim Jensen, and the absolute legend in this category, George Blanda come to mind.  Troy is our local hero.  Troy was the Pats all time receiver in yards and receptions.  He played defensive back during the 2004 season when the Patriots backfield was decimated by injuries and came in 2nd in the number of interception on the team that year.  He was their 4th string quarterback.   He was their all time leading punt returner.

People in San Diego still rue the moment where Tom Brady threw an interception late in the 4th Quarter of the playoff game and Troy Brown crossed the line of scrimmage on a cut-in, saw the interception and mentally switched to from receiver to defensive back and stripped the ball from San Diego’s defensive back thus saving the game for the Patriots.    (And for my Intuit colleagues in San Diego, please bear with me, there’s a point to this beyond opening up a old sporting wound).

The reason I write all this is to call attention to a team within a team here at Intuit’s Platform-as-a-Service Group, our Quality Assurance team.  In the lean (and growing) team environment they play at every position.   They do release management tasks, they regression test our code, they take customer issues escalated from support, they write automated tests and, in a couple of cases, helped us write some code when we were short staffed.

The Platform-as-a-Service Group here is staffed with people who are always willing to do whatever needs to be done to get the job done.   Now for full disclosure, up to about a month ago, I’ve actually been both the development and QA manager.  Given the growth of both teams, we’re looking for that right person to lead the QA team to the next level (that’s a plug, we are recruiting).  I just wanted to give a high-five to our QA engineers for the multitude of things they do to improve the quality of our products: QuickBase and the Intuit Partner Platform.

Finally I just want to say that Troy Brown has not endorsed QuickBase as a product, but I’m endorsing that our QA team does their job like Troy Brown did his.