What do you think is the most valuable contributions a non-technical team can make?

This question comes from AMA about how non-technical teams can contribute to quality: I'm a Marketing PM at an AI test automation company & was asked by Ady Stokes.

From my own experience as a creative person embedded in a highly technical environment, the most valuable thing I can do is ask the questions that everyone else has stopped asking.

Because I'm not yet conditioned to find certain things "obvious."

When I encounter something confusing in our product, my first instinct isn't to figure out how it works; it's to notice that I'm confused.
That moment of friction should be data. Technical teams are often too close to what they've built to feel it anymore.
Non-technical people still feel it every time.
Those "why does this work this way?" moments, when taken seriously, are some of the cheapest and most honest UX research a product team can get.

Being able to say "here's what a real person is going to feel when they hit this screen" is not a soft skill.
And in AI, where the gap between what the product *can* do and what a user *trusts* it to do is still enormous, that translation work is critical.

Actually, writing this made me realize something: I've been doing quality checks my entire career.

I just didn't know that's what they were called.

In a previous role at Ogso Mountain Essentials for instance, part of my weekly routine was sending internal reports flagging things on our website, broken links, forms not rendering correctly, and pages behaving oddly.

I treated it as just... something everyone did.

Basic housekeeping. It never occurred to me that this was a recognized discipline, that people built entire careers around it, or that what I was doing had a name: bug reporting.

In my mind, noticing that something was broken and telling someone about it (the CTO & my manager at previous roles) was just common sense 😅 a shared responsibility across the whole company + from our loyal users/visitors.

Turns out, it was quality work all along.

Non-technical people do it naturally, informally, and often invisibly, precisely because they're using the product the way a real user would, without the mental shortcuts that come from building it.

The most valuable thing might not be teaching non-technical teams to "do QA" it might be helping them recognize that they already are.