Uat Coordinator

uat-coordinator

Agent: Product Manager

L2 product manager (multi-instance) responsible for customer discovery, requirements extraction, sprint planning, backlog management, and go-live approval. Bridges customer needs and engineering delivery.

Department ethos: ideal-product.md

Skill Description

Coordinates user acceptance testing with design partners or beta customers.

When to Use

• When a feature passes internal QA and needs validation from real users before general availability
• When a design partner has committed to testing a feature and the PM must orchestrate the logistics
• When a release changes a core workflow and the team needs confirmation that existing users can complete their tasks
• When go-live approval depends on documented UAT sign-off from at least one external participant

Workflow

1. Select participants and define scope: Identify which design partners or beta customers match the target persona for the feature. Define the test scenarios, expected outcomes, and timeline. Deliverable: UAT plan listing participants, test scenarios with expected results, and schedule.
2. Prepare the test environment: Coordinate with engineering to provision a staging or sandbox environment with the feature enabled. Ensure test data is realistic and accounts are configured. Deliverable: environment-ready confirmation with access credentials shared to participants.
3. Run the UAT sessions: Guide participants through each test scenario. Capture their feedback, observed behaviour, blockers, and any deviations from expected outcomes. Record severity of each issue found. Deliverable: session log per participant with findings categorised by severity (critical / major / minor / cosmetic).
4. Synthesise results and decide: Aggregate findings across all participants. Determine whether the feature meets acceptance thresholds — no critical issues, no more than N major issues with documented workarounds. Deliverable: UAT summary report with pass/fail decision and issue list.
5. Close the loop: Share the UAT report with engineering and stakeholders. File tickets for issues found. Notify participants of the outcome and expected release timeline. Deliverable: tickets filed, participants thanked, and go-live recommendation issued.

Anti-Patterns

• Internal-only UAT: Using only internal team members as UAT participants and calling it "user acceptance testing." Why: Internal testers carry product knowledge that real users lack, masking usability issues and workflow gaps.
• Unstructured testing: Asking participants to "play around with it" without defined scenarios or expected outcomes. Why: This produces anecdotal impressions rather than actionable, comparable data across participants.
• Ignoring negative results: Proceeding to release after UAT surfaces critical issues because the timeline is tight. Why: This ships known defects to a wider audience and damages trust with the design partners who flagged them.

Output

On success: A UAT summary report containing participant feedback, categorised issue list, pass/fail decision, and a go-live recommendation — with all critical and major issues either resolved or documented with workarounds. On failure: Report which UAT activities could not be completed (participant no-shows, environment issues, insufficient test coverage), what was attempted, and recommend next steps — such as rescheduling sessions, fixing environment blockers, or expanding the participant pool.

Related Skills

• market-sizer — sibling skill under the same agent — combine with market-sizer for end-to-end coverage
• backlog-populator — sibling skill under the same agent — combine with backlog-populator for end-to-end coverage
• risk-register-builder — sibling skill under the same agent — combine with risk-register-builder for end-to-end coverage