How Optimum turned Forbes’ QA function into a well-oiled machine

Ronak Ray leads Quality Assurance and Technical Project Management at Forbes. When he joined the company at the beginning of 2019, the Quality Assurance team had been working with two external companies — Optimum Partners and another shop. To streamline his team’s operations, Ronak naturally began considering whether he could reduce his number of external partners to one.

Optimum Partners was the easy choice for Ronak because of three factors. The first was that the Optimum Partners team always had a positive outlook. Instead of focusing on problems, they’d orient conversations toward solutions. Another difference was that Optimum Partners took a proactive approach. They offered initial ideas and roadmaps,  anticipated issues, and fixed them before they even happened.

Says Ronak, “Optimum Partners really understood our business needs and priorities, and started raising the right types of questions to get it done.”

The third reason Ronak chose Optimum Partners was the team’s flexibility and adaptability to change. When Ronak joined, the team had just adopted a new automated testing framework a few months prior. But after learning about it, he knew maintenance would be easier in the long run if they switched. Switching frameworks meant the team had to rewrite all the tests they had just written in a new language. Optimum Partners scrapped the old work without complaint. 

Within three or four months, Optimum Partners had become Forbes’ sole QA partner. Now, four years later, their relationship has grown significantly. Optimum Partners accounts for 90% of Forbes’ QA total headcount.

“They’re still very proactive — that trait hasn’t gone away. They always go above and beyond, listening for feedback and making themselves available to us.”

As Forbes’ relationship with Optimum Partners grew, so did Optimum Partners’ sense of ownership over their work there. Two years ago, Forbes did a large-scale integration with a software provider for managing its subscription system. It was a huge project and the release was at night for Forbes team members so the site wouldn’t be disrupted. Optimum Partners team members not only signed on in the early morning their time for the release, but stayed online well into the night to make sure everything went smoothly.

Forbes came to learn that Optimum Partners team members work well under pressure. Forbes regularly publishes high profile lists like the Billionaires list and 30 Under 30. These lists are high publicity, have fixed launch dates, and the assets come in at the last minute because of how many partners are involved. In the days approaching launch mornings, the work gets intense and the team often works around the clock. Optimum Partners maintains the same positivity, flexibility, and ownership in these situations that they exhibited in the beginning.

More recently, Forbes was integrating with a new privacy provider for managing cookies and user consent, and the project was experiencing a very tricky bug. But because he was so passionate about solving it, one of the Optimum Partners engineers worked over the weekend to identify and solve the issue — without even being asked.

It’s now safe to say that Optimum Partners has become completely embedded within the Forbes QA team. Optimum Partners not only makes up 90% of the team’s head count, they have also invested in adopting Forbes’ tooling, became certified in Forbes’ platforms, and learned the Forbes engineering roadmap — all signs of Optimum Partners’ commitment to the long-term.

The rest of the team and broader Forbes tech organization loves interacting with Optimum Partners for their kindness, openness, and empathy. Optimum Partners seeks input from all sources and has collaborative relationships with not just Ronak’s team, but Engineering and DevOps too.

“I never have to worry about people management or conflict resolution because Optimum Partners is always pleasant to work with. The camaraderie between consultant and employee adds so much value to what we get.”

Ultimately, Optimum Partners has helped the QA team win the trust of their peers. Before Ronak joined, QA was outsourced entirely. Ronak was the first in-house QA team member, and trust in the team among the organization didn’t exist. The Optimum team invested time and energy in understanding Forbes’ applications and establishing processes. Now, people from outside the team come to QA as subject matter experts.

“There’s no difference between a Forbes employee and an Optimum employee for us. We don’t consider them separate at all — they’re part of the team.”

Working with Optimum Partners hasn’t just made Ronak’s life “a lot easier and less tense” — Optimum is the reason Ronak leads Technical Project Management in addition to QA. When Ronak started at Forbes, QA was his only responsibility. But in the years since Optimum Partners integrated with the team, QA started to work more autonomously:

“I don’t need to tell them what to do or how to do it. The group is a well-oiled machine.”

The team functions so well because of the processes they have in place, the understanding they have, and the judgment for when to escalate. The success of the team eventually let Ronak widen his attention, which let him take on Technical Project Management — a previously siloed and leaderless team. With Optimum Partners’ support on QA, Ronak has turned another problem area for Forbes into a streamlined organization.

To Ronak, Forbes’ future with Optimum Partners looks bright given the consistency and quality of their work.

 “Everyone is happy with how they work with us and what we’ve delivered, so our relationship is only going to get stronger and stronger.”