24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas reports that hiring a QA specialist to check work before it reaches him cut errors dramatically. A Basecamp example shows how a developer's subscription upgrade had bugs the QA caught, then iterated with the GM until it worked reliably. His advice: hire detail-oriented people, give them a QA title, and let them question everything.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that is dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 88, follow up on my Quality Assurance OFS experiment. Getting poor work back from my team has been one of the pitfalls of turning tasks 100% over to my OFS. It's frustrating. And when something gets left undone that seems like so obvious to me, I just. I get so frustrated. And I wasn't sure how to fix this until now. And this has been so good. So about a month ago, I talked on the podcast, I wrote a newsletter about a terrible video that got published by my team. I talked about how it got published, who published it, why it got published, and then about how I set a process in place towards trying to prevent that kind of thing from happening again. And it has changed my life. So I put a quality assurance person in charge of, number one, checking all content before it gets published or before it comes to me, actually. So a video gets edited, it gets proposed for publishing, the quality assurance person looks at it, content gets written, it gets proposed for publishing, that person looks at it, both of them, before it comes to me, which has been really great because I see that that person is making edits to the content or suggestions to the video. And then when it comes to me, I get all the way down the list, having seen all the edits done, then I just see the final product and I get to look at the final product and there's something wrong there. Fin willing to say something, but usually now it's really, really great. I rarely say something anymore about the problems, so they don't always catch everything, but it's. It's pretty rare. So I recently had this task in Basecamp where we were trying to allow people to upgrade from a monthly subscription to a yearly subscription. And it got proposed by the developer that it was done. And I have a quality assurance person I talked about just on content. I also have one on software. The developer proposed, this is done. I tagged the quality assurance person. He went in and looked at it and was like, hey, what about this and this? And the developer said, oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I need to fix that. But this one. Here's the explanation. And so he went and fixed it, comes back and says, so the quality assurance person goes in and looks at him, was like, yeah, your explanation's cool, but what about this and this and this? And thank you for fixing that other thing. Yes, that's done now. So the developer comes back and he's like, oh, yeah. Here's the explanation for what you're asking about. This and this and this and this. The General Manager of Onlinejobs pH, who is one of my, who's the first ofs I ever hired, he comes in and questions some things. The developer explains QA person inserts something else and they all decide, hey, yep, this is done. So now I come in at the end of this whole conversation and I glance through the whole conversation, look at the bottom, see it's done. And I'm like, yeah, like this is, it's great. Like you guys totally solved these problems and I didn't have to do it. So if you are struggling with getting good work back from your ofs, let me suggest that you put a quality assurance person in the middle and let me make a couple suggestions here. So number one, when you do this person, make sure that they are a detail oriented person. Don't just hire someone random. Make sure you have someone who is very detail oriented and you don't find someone detail oriented by posting and saying, I need someone detail oriented. You have to make sure. And in my one VAOA challenge, I talk all through how I make sure that people are detail oriented. Number two, give that person a title and a responsibility. So give them a title of quality assurance, like quality assurance specialist, and then make sure that they know it's their job to say things are wrong here, like things don't look right. It's their job to question if things are being done correctly. Even if they think someone else is an expert and maybe they know more than me, I shouldn't question this. They need to question when they see something wrong. That's their job. And giving this title and the authority to question things will really make a difference on how successful that person is with their quality assurance work.
