Sivakumar

I didn't plan any of this, honestly. My first real job was Manual Tester at a startup called Gethu Games — a few months before that I barely knew what QA meant. Mostly I just clicked through builds, wrote test cases, and tried to figure out why something that worked fine yesterday had quietly broken overnight.

The CEO there actually took time to teach me automation. Protractor with Node.js was the first stack I ever touched, and I still remember how satisfying it felt the first time a script ran start to finish without me babysitting it. Then COVID hit and testing took a back seat for a while — I landed on the phones instead, doing inbound support for a year. Not testing at all, but it taught me how to actually listen to someone who's annoyed and figure out what they need, fast.

After that I joined The Clinic Place, and that's where it got interesting — support and testing at the same time, which sounds chaotic (it was) but meant I saw the whole picture: how a small team decides what to build next, how features get tested before they ship, and how many ideas get thrown out before one actually sticks.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I stopped treating "testing" and "customer success" as two different jobs. They're really the same question — does this actually work for the person using it? I still ask that one every day.