Test Lead

Role Summary

The UAT Test Lead owns the end-to-end validation of features delivered to the UAT environment. This role is responsible for understanding product features and business requirements, planning, coordinating, and overseeing the UAT POD's testing activities, ensuring feature quality, timely sign-off, and clear communication with business stakeholders, development teams, and project management.

Key Responsibilities:

• Understand end to end product features and business requirements
• Own the overall UAT strategy, test planning, and execution schedule for features moving into the UAT environment.
• Analyze business requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria to define UAT scope and test coverage.
• Allocate and prioritize testing tasks across the 3 testers based on feature complexity and release timelines.
• Review and approve test cases, test scenarios, and traceability matrices prepared by testers.
• Coordinate with Development, Business Analysts, Product Owners, and Release Management teams to align on UAT entry/exit criteria.
• Track defects identified during UAT, drive triage discussions, and ensure timely resolution with development teams.
• Conduct daily/weekly status reviews with the POD and provide progress reports to stakeholders and leadership.
• Own the UAT sign-off process ensuring features meet defined acceptance criteria before promotion to production.
• Identify risks, bottlenecks, and environment/data issues in the UAT cycle and drive mitigation plans.
• Mentor and guide testers on test design, defect management, and UAT best practices.
• Continuously improve UAT processes, templates, and reporting mechanisms for the POD.
• Maintain UAT metrics/dashboards (test coverage, defect trends, pass/fail rates, sign-off status).

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• 8+ years of overall QA/testing experience, with proven experience leading UAT or functional testing teams.
• Strong understanding of UAT processes, test planning, defect lifecycle, and sign-off governance.
• Experience managing a small team of testers, including task allocation and performance tracking.
• Execute functional and end-to-end test cases in the UAT environment for assigned features.
• Log, document, and track defects clearly with steps to reproduce, evidence (screenshots/logs), and severity/priority.
• Hands-on experience with test management and defect tracking tools (e.g., JIRA, Azure DevOps, HP ALM, Zephyr).
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills able to liaise with business, product, and engineering teams.
• Solid understanding of SDLC/Agile methodologies and release management processes.
• Ability to read and interpret business requirements, functional specs, and acceptance criteria.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making abilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for status reporting and sign-off documentation.

Good to Have:

• Domain knowledge relevant to the business/product area being tested especially in retail sales domain.
• Exposure to basic SQL for data validation.
• Experience with test automation frameworks (for coordination with automation teams, not hands-on required).
• ISTQB or equivalent testing certification.