Quality Assurance Manager

“It’s quality, not quantity, that counts.” Although it’s applicable in many situations — for example, the number of people you date, the number of vacations you take, and the number of reps you do at the gym — that expression’s especially appropriate in the world of manufacturing, where companies must take great care not to sacrifice standards for sales.

It’s a classic scenario: A company makes widgets that people love. Demand is through the roof, so the company ramps up production to make more widgets more quickly. Unfortunately, the increased speed results in errors that cause products to break, malfunction, or even harm consumers. As a result, the company’s reputation erodes and demand for widgets disappears — all because quality was sacrificed for quantity.

When you’re a Quality Assurance Manager, it’s your job to avoid that scenario by implementing processes and procedures that ensure products and services meet or exceed customers’ expectations.

Unlike quality control, which is the process of policing a product’s quality after it’s been manufactured, quality assurance is the process of creating systems that will guarantee products’ quality before they’re made. With that subtle but important difference in mind, the Quality Assurance Manager oversees the Quality Assurance Engineers and Quality Assurance Technicians in order to design — as well as enforce — quality assurance protocols that satisfy external government regulations and meet internal company standards.

As a Manager, you don’t execute quality assurance procedures; instead, you supervise them as a liaison between your company’s corporate offices and its product development department. Simply put, as a Quality Assurance Manager you “assure” quality assurance!