Management, systems thinking, and the loop: Inside the quality architect role

Karim Jouini is CEO and co-founder of Thunders, an AI testing company built after he and his co-founder Jihed Othmani sold their expense management business, Expensya. He's never held a tester job title, but he's managed QA teams for most of his career, first at Microsoft and then across a fintech operating in sixty countries where regulation changed two or three times a week.

In this episode, Karim tells Rosie about beta testing the Xbox Kinect, a project he says was far harder to test than to build, and about the hiring culture he pushed back on at Microsoft, where strong engineers were steered into development and average ones into testing. He and Rosie land on "quality architect" as a title worth making popular, and talk through what that role actually needs: management skills, systems thinking, an understanding of the whole delivery loop, and product-oriented quality metrics.