Rethinking the QA Timeline
For too long, quality assurance has been treated as the final hurdle in a product’s journey. The product is developed, polished, and sent to QA for a final check before launch. But in today’s fast-moving, innovation-driven business world, that model just doesn’t hold up. QA can’t be a checkpoint at the end—it needs to be embedded at the beginning.
As the founder and CEO of North Valley Precision, I’ve seen firsthand how bringing QA into the earliest stages of product strategy changes everything. It’s not just about catching bugs—it’s about preventing them in the first place. It’s about building smarter, faster, and with more confidence.
When quality assurance is part of early product conversations, we’re able to identify risks before they become problems. We can influence architecture decisions, usability considerations, and testability. And most importantly, we can help our clients save time, money, and stress by shifting the mindset from “quality control” to “quality by design.”
The High Cost of Late-Stage QA
A lot of businesses still view QA as a reactive step. Something they need to check off the list right before shipping. But what they often don’t realize is how expensive that approach can be. Fixing a bug found in production doesn’t just cost development hours—it costs customer trust, reputation, and sometimes even compliance violations.
When you wait until the end of the test, you limit your options. You’re now reacting instead of proactively designing with quality in mind. If the foundation is flawed, all you can do is patch it. You can’t rebuild it without massive delays. That’s where companies get stuck in a cycle of release, fix, patch, repeat. And that cycle eats away at margins and morale.
Brandon Erickson, Wisconsin-born entrepreneur and lifelong problem solver, didn’t build a company on reaction. At North Valley Precision, we push hard to be upstream in the process, helping clients fix smarter—not just faster. That means being in the room early. During planning. During design. That’s where the real wins are made.
Partnering From Day One
The shift starts with mindset. QA isn’t just about testing—it’s about understanding. Understanding the product, the user, the business goals, and the technical risks. That requires tight collaboration between engineering, product management, and QA teams from day one.
When we’re brought into kickoff meetings, we start asking the right questions. How will this product be used? What environments will it operate in? What are the failure points we can anticipate? By asking those questions early, we uncover things others may overlook. Sometimes it’s a performance consideration. Sometimes it’s a security concern. Other times it’s about ensuring that automated testing can be implemented efficiently from the start.
This level of integration isn’t just good for QA—it’s good for the entire product team. It creates shared accountability and a stronger sense of purpose. It also makes the entire process smoother. Fewer surprises. Fewer fire drills. More predictable, confident delivery.
Speed and Quality Can Coexist
One of the biggest myths in tech is that you have to choose between speed and quality. But when QA is integrated early, you can actually have both. Products get to market faster, with fewer post-launch issues, because they were built the right way from the start.
At North Valley Precision, we’ve worked with companies at all stages—startups moving fast, and enterprise clients dealing with scale. In every case, we’ve found that embedding QA early reduces rework and boosts agility. When quality is part of the DNA, there’s no need for heroics at the eleventh hour.
This philosophy isn’t just something we preach to our clients—it’s how we operate internally. As we’ve grown from a small, lean team to an operation pushing toward 100 employees, we’ve baked this approach into our systems and training. Every person who joins the company understands that we’re not just testing—we’re building trust and shaping outcomes.
Failures Are Lessons, Not Endings
One of the benefits of early QA involvement is that it creates a safe space to fail early and fail small. And that’s a good thing. A failed test in the prototype phase is much easier—and cheaper—to fix than a customer escalation in production.
This “fail fast, fix smarter” approach isn’t about accepting failure. It’s about using it as a strategic tool. It allows teams to be bold with innovation while keeping risk under control. When testing is part of the foundation, you can explore new ideas without betting the company on every feature.
We had a client recently who was developing a complex IoT product. By looping us into early development discussions, we were able to flag a data integrity issue in their architecture before a single line of code was deployed. Fixing it took one meeting and a few design changes. Catching it post-launch would have taken weeks and involved firmware updates for thousands of devices. That’s the power of early QA.
Creating a Culture of Quality
Changing how QA fits into product strategy isn’t just about process—it’s about culture. It requires everyone to see quality as their responsibility, not just the QA team’s. That mindset shift doesn’t happen overnight, but when it does, it’s powerful.
At North Valley Precision, we’ve built our entire culture around ownership. Engineers own quality, project managers own communication, and QA owns improvement—not just inspection. This kind of alignment only works when everyone sees QA as a strategic partner, not a safety net.
For Brandon Erickson, Wisconsin roots taught him the value of hard work, consistency, and integrity. Those same values are embedded in how we deliver quality. We don’t chase perfection—we pursue progress, one decision at a time, always with the customer experience in mind.
The Future of QA is Strategic
As technology evolves, so does QA. Automation, AI, and predictive analytics are transforming how we test and monitor products. But even as tools improve, the principle remains the same: quality has to be intentional, and it has to start early.
The companies that will win in the next decade aren’t the ones who rush the fastest. They’re the ones who build smart, test early, and earn customer trust with every release. QA is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a core part of product success.
At North Valley Precision, we’re proud to lead that charge. We don’t just test—we guide, support, and shape outcomes from the first conversation to the final product. Because when QA is done right, it’s not a stop sign. It’s a launchpad.
And that’s exactly where we plan to keep taking our clients—forward, faster, and with quality built in from the start.