KRISTI A. LUGO

Leadership, Strategy & Ownership

• Led quality assurance for ParPOS, a SaaS point-of-sale platform with a web-based back-office and Windows/Linux desktop front-house applications used by quick-service and fast-casual restaurant brands.
• Owned end-to-end quality for a multi-tier SaaS platform, ensuring releases met reliability and customer-confidence expectations across web, desktop, and backend services.
• Defined and evolved QA strategy to support frequent SaaS releases while reducing production risk and minimizing customer-impacting issues.
• Built, mentored, and led distributed QA teams, including offshore contractors, in a fully remote environment, improving consistency, accountability, and test effectiveness across time zones.
• Created onboarding programs and multi-week internal QA training course, accelerating ramp-up for new hires and enhancing testing quality.
• Established QA standards, templates, and documentation practices, driving clarity, repeatability, and cross-team alignment.
• Presented quality status, risks, and trade-offs to leadership, enabling informed go/no-go decisions for high-impact releases.
• Fostered culture of shared ownership and trust, contributing to consistently high employee engagement within QA organization.

Delivery, Planning & Release Readiness

• Owned test planning and execution for major releases, upgrades, and customer-specific initiatives, ensuring predictable delivery and reduced late-cycle surprises.
• Applied risk-based testing to focus effort where failures would most affect customers, leading to higher confidence releases with limited QA resources.
• Led teams responsible for end-to-end workflows, UAT, feature validation, and client-specific testing, ensuring real-world usage scenarios were covered.
• Identified dependencies, constraints, and testability gaps early, partnering with Engineering and Product to prevent downstream rework and delays.
• Coordinated cross-team quality initiatives such as compatibility, upgrade paths, and data integrity testing, reducing upgrade-related production issues.

Customer Engagement & Production Quality

• Built strong customer trust through clear communication of quality processes, realistic expectations, and regular product walkthroughs.
• Worked directly with Tier-1 customers to align testing with their business workflows, improving satisfaction during major releases and rollouts.
• Analyzed customer support tickets and production incidents to identify patterns and drive preventative quality improvements.
• Led cross-functional defect triage and production issue response, accelerating resolution times and reducing repeat issues.
• Played a key role in root-cause analysis and fix validation, helping teams learn from failures rather than repeat them.
• SaaS point-of-sale platform with a web-based back-office and Windows/Linux desktop front-house applications used by quick-service and fast-casual restaurant brands.

Hands-On QA Foundation

• Extensive manual testing background including functional, regression, sanity, edge-case, and exploratory testing.
• Designed and executed end-to-end workflows across multi-role and multi-system integrations.
• Validated UI behavior, permissions/roles, data integrity, workflows, and upgrade scenarios.
• Served as QA subject-matter expert for multiple core product features.
• Extensive use of Jira, TestRail, Confluence, and SharePoint.
• Scrum Master certified; served as part-time Scrum Master for one of the organization’s first Agile teams.

• Led manual QA for web and complex desktop applications; developed test plans, training programs, and QA documentation to maintain quality standards.

• Executed manual testing for high-visibility web-based financial products to ensure quality and functionality.

• End-to-end QA ownership for Windows-based products; regression testing and technical documentation.
• Built customer trust through clear communication of project capabilities, and consistent product walkthroughs.