There’s a familiar role on a team: tester, test engineer, software quality assurance — someone who tests an application professionally.
But it would be cool to have a professional user: not a professional tester, but someone who uses the product professionally. For example, if a company is building an ecommerce platform, the team would include someone who sells products on that marketplace and someone who buys there. They could work part-time or join for individual sessions. They wouldn’t need to write test plans — just use the product. Their responsibility would be to provide feedback and report user experience problems.
This is somewhat like beta testers, but as I see it:
- beta testers are invited too late;
- they usually aren’t employees or contractors of the organization developing the product, so they have no obligation to report anything at all.
A job as an in-house user could be well protected against the threat of AI and agents. People in the industry still say testers are unnecessary because an agent will replace them. But a business owner would have to be out of their mind to say, “Users are unnecessary.”
Does your organization have a professional user role? Have you heard of anything like this?