How I Helped Build a Product From Scratch as a Test Engineer

In early 2017, a friend called me and said:

“I want to build an app. I don’t have a tech team. No developers. Nothing. Can you help?”

At the time, I had around three years of experience as a Test Engineer.
I wasn’t a programmer. I wasn’t a designer. I hadn’t led a product before.

But I understood systems, risks, and how things break when assumptions go unch…