Your organisation needs senior QA leadership. You don’t need a full-time hire to get it.

The Fractional QA Director model gives you an experienced QA leader embedded in your organisation for a fixed number of days per month — at a fraction of the cost of a permanent appointment.

Talk to us about Fractional QA Director

The Problem

The QA leadership gap is more common than organisations admit.

Most technology organisations have testers. Fewer have QA strategy. Even fewer have someone accountable for the whole picture — test coverage, release confidence, team capability, governance, and the connection between quality and delivery risk. When that leadership gap exists, it doesn’t stay invisible for long.

Quality problems that recur despite effort and investment

A QA Director role you can’t fill, or can’t afford to fill permanently

A team that runs on goodwill rather than clear strategy and governance

What Is It

Senior QA leadership, without the overhead of a permanent hire.

What the Fractional QA Director does
Our QA Director works with your organisation for a fixed number of days each month — typically between two and eight — operating as your senior QA leader. Not as a consultant who delivers a report and leaves. As the person accountable for QA strategy within your organisation.
In practice this means: setting and owning the QA strategy, establishing governance and quality gates, mentoring and developing the in-house QA team, reviewing test coverage and release confidence, and attending the leadership conversations where quality belongs.

Starter

2 days per month

Core

4 days per month

Strategic

6 days per month

Transformation

8 days per month

Minimum recommended term: 3 months. Meaningful strategic change takes time. Engagements are month-to-month after the initial term with 30 days’ notice. Scale up or down as your needs change.

VERSUS HIRING

What a full-time hire actually costs.

Full-time QA Director hire
Salary
On-costs (NI, pension, benefits)
Recruitment fee
Time to hire: 3–6 months
Risk: wrong hire costs 6–12 months of salary

Fractional QA Director – iQspeaks
Fractional Costs (Retainer)
No on-costs
No recruitment fee
Operational within days, not months
Scale up or down monthly
24 years of experience from day one

WHO IT’S FOR

The Fractional QA Director works best when…

A good fit ✓

✓ You have a QA team but no senior strategic leadership above them
✓ You’re scaling rapidly and quality is struggling to keep pace
✓ You’re in a regulated industry where QA governance is non-negotiable
✓ You’ve lost a senior QA leader and need cover while you hire
✓ You want senior oversight without the cost or commitment of a permanent hire
✓ You’re going through a cloud migration, platform change or major transformation

Probably not the right fit ✗

✗ You need a team of engineers to execute testing — see Testing as a Service
✗ You want a one-off assessment rather than ongoing leadership — see QA HealthCheck
✗ You need daily hands-on testing or automation delivery

WHO DELIVERS IT

Not a consultant. Your QA Director.

Sanyam Kaushik spent 24 years as a QA leader inside HSBC, Deutsche Bank, UBS and BBC iPlayer — managing teams of 100+, running budgets of circa 4M, and leading quality across major transformation and greenfield regulatory programme. He founded IQspeaks to make that level of QA leadership available to organisations that need it, on terms that work for them.

Years in QA leadership

100+

People in largest team

£ 3.8 million

Annual budget managed

0.01 %

Defect leakage achieved

80 %

Regression effort reduced

Ready to talk about what this looks like for your organisation?

Tell us where you are and we’ll tell you honestly if this is the right fit.

Get in Touch