“No lie, just know I chose my own fate. I drove by the fork in the road and went straight.” - Jay Z
If you’ve read my earlier post, you know I didn’t exactly have a master plan for getting into tech. I stumbled into a BCA degree, survived it, and came out the other side with a diploma and zero idea what to do next.
What happened next was three jobs that each taught me something completely different, and together, they made me who I am today.
Chapter 1: Monotype, Where It All Started
June 2022. Fresh out of college, I joined Monotype (a font-based technology company) as a QA Trainee.
I didn’t fully understand what QA was when I walked in. Testing? Sure, I knew the word. But the discipline behind it, the lifecycle, the methodology, the way it connects to everything else in a product… that was new.
At Monotype, I learned the fundamentals:
- What end-to-end testing actually means
- How to do manual testing that’s thorough, not just checkbox-driven
- How agile teams work in practice, not just in theory
- How to document and communicate findings so engineers actually listen
It was my foundation. Everything I do today traces back to those six months.
The first job doesn’t define your career. But it shapes how you think about work.
Chapter 2: Cedcoss Technologies, The Wide Lens
January 2023. I moved to Cedcoss Technologies as a Business Analyst. This was a deliberate shift. I wanted to understand the bigger picture, not just the testing layer.
And Cedcoss gave me exactly that. A wide-angle view of how products actually work:
E-commerce integrations. I learned how third-party systems connect, how data flows between platforms, and why integration testing exists.
Product implementation. I saw how designs become features, how stakeholder requirements get translated (and sometimes lost in translation), and what it takes to ship something real.
Client management. I worked directly with US-based clients. Real conversations, real expectations, real pressure. This taught me communication skills no course ever could.
Internal tooling. Sales, support, CRM systems… I touched all of it. Zoho, Freshsales, Freshdesk. I understood how the business side connects to the product side.
This wasn’t just a job. It was a crash course in everything that surrounds the code.
By the time I left, I could look at a product and see it from multiple angles: the user’s perspective, the business logic, the technical constraints, and the support implications.
Chapter 3: Commenda, Putting It All Together
August 2024. I joined Commenda as a QA Engineer focused on Product & Operations.
This is where everything clicked.
At Commenda, I wasn’t just testing features. I was:
- Collaborating with engineers on product logic before code was written
- Working with designers to catch UX issues early
- Building CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for automated regression testing
- Using AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code to generate test scenarios and catch edge cases faster
- Reducing response times: we took customer First Response Time from 5 hours to under 5 minutes
- Building dashboards to track SLA compliance and team performance
- Owning customer success: understanding entity management, compliance, and operations
This role demanded everything I’d learned before: the QA fundamentals from Monotype, the product thinking from Cedcoss, and the do-or-die mindset from my personal journey.
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” - Mike Tyson
The real world doesn’t follow test scripts. Users don’t behave predictably. Edge cases aren’t edge cases when they happen to real people. Commenda taught me that quality isn’t just about finding bugs. It’s about understanding the entire system well enough to prevent them.
The Accidental Career
Here’s what I find interesting about my journey: none of it was planned.
I didn’t set out to become a QA engineer. I didn’t have a five-year career roadmap. I just showed up, learned everything I could at each stop, and said yes to things that scared me.
- Monotype taught me how to test
- Cedcoss taught me what to test and why it matters
- Commenda taught me how to own quality end-to-end
Today, I can work across QA, product operations, business analysis, and customer success. Not because I planned to, but because each role gave me a piece of the puzzle, and I was paying enough attention to put them together.
What’s Next
I don’t know exactly where I’ll be in five years. I’ve learned that plans are overrated and adaptability is underrated.
What I do know is this: I’ll keep showing up. I’ll keep learning. And I’ll keep treating every challenge like it’s do-or-die.
Because that’s the only way I know how to do it.
“Looking back, I didn’t plan this journey, but every step prepared me for where I am today.”
If this resonated, you might enjoy reading about what QA taught me about products and life.