Liliia Abdulina explores how QA leaders are accountable for confidence or, simply put, for making quality good. However, they rarely control the roadmap, deadlines, or architecture, and they have no say in developers’ motivation mechanisms, so influence becomes their main lever.

In her transition from individual contributor to Head of QA on a large Kotlin ecosystem codebase, Liliia started in “catch-up” mode: coverage gaps everywhere, QA staffed late, and quality conversations happening only at the end. The team worked to reach baseline coverage across the compiler, build tools, and a growing tool ecosystem, while she was iteratively reasoning about headcount. Over the next couple of years, they invested in sustainable quality - clear responsibility areas (automation, performance, exploratory), repeatable regression handling, and trust with engineering.

A real test came when a new project appeared: for the first time, she proposed QA capacity and a stabilization budget up front, and a project lead asked, “Why exactly those numbers?” Instead of defending estimates, she explained options and consequences: how risk shifts when you go bigger or smaller, what becomes predictable, and what “done” means.

She addresses how to define those numbers and how to communicate them effectively to stakeholders. Liliia shares how this quality narrative scaled as the team grew from 5 to 38 and moved quality issues off users’ list of top pain points. Attendees will leave with a simple narrative structure and language to lead quality without formal authority.