Josh McCarter, Senior SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) at Dunelm, joined us for a fireside chat in front of a room full of associates. The theme for the day was working smarter, not harder, and Josh brought eleven years of experience in quality and testing to the conversation, along with some hard-won opinions on ownership, feedback and what actually makes a career move forward.
1. Know exactly what you own
Josh’s starting point on working smarter was simple: understand exactly what you’re responsible for, and do that as well as you can. The trouble starts when people drift into other people’s work.
“If you’re working on what you’re owning, you get to do that as best you can,” he said. The less smart version, in his experience, is scope creep: quietly picking up tasks that belong to someone else because you have the skills or the interest to do them.
That doesn’t mean staying in a lane and ignoring everyone else. Josh described his own role as one of facilitating rather than fixing, spending ten or fifteen minutes unblocking an engineer, offering a second pair of eyes, or asking the right question at the right moment. Helping someone think something through is not the same as taking their ticket off their hands.
2. Ask questions, not statements
One of the clearest threads running through the conversation was the power of asking questions rather than telling people what to do.
“Not thinking in statements and thinking in questions is much more powerful, because you’re not telling people things,” Josh explained. “You’re asking people what they think about something. So you help them think about it, and then you learn what they think about it.”
This applies just as much to feedback and difficult conversations as it does to technical problem solving. Rather than telling a colleague their work isn’t good enough, Josh’s approach is to ask what they were trying to achieve, and let the gaps surface naturally. It disarms defensiveness and keeps ownership where it belongs, with the person doing the work.
3. Internal customers are still customers
Josh has spent much of his career on internal enterprise software, and he pushed back firmly on the idea that internal tools matter less because “it’s just for the business.”
“Those internal people are still customers,” he said. Cutting corners because a system is internal-facing costs more further down the line, in fixes, in lost productivity, and in the trust of the colleagues who have to use it every day.
For Josh, a quality first approach isn’t a role, it’s a mindset that runs end to end: owning your own work, staying aware of what’s happening around you, and being willing to ask a blocked colleague what they’re actually struggling with, rather than waiting for it to become your problem too.
4. Ask for feedback on one thing, not everything
Several associates in the room asked how to get better, more useful feedback, particularly from senior stakeholders who are stretched thin.
Josh’s answer pointed to a simple fix: narrow the scope. Asking for general feedback puts the burden on the other person to work out what you mean. Asking about one specific meeting, decision or piece of work makes it far easier for people to give you something useful.
One simple framework came up more than once during the session: start, stop, continue. What should I start doing? What should I stop? What’s working, so I should keep going? It turns a vague ask into a conversation someone can actually answer, and it works just as well in the moment as it does in a formal review.
5. Learn with intent, not for the certificate
On the topic of upskilling, Josh was candid that not every course or certification is worth chasing. His advice was to learn what will genuinely make your job easier or open a specific door, not to collect qualifications for their own sake.
What matters more than the learning itself is what you do with it. “It’s not just I did the thing, it’s I did the thing and I learned XYZ,” he said. That’s the difference between a certificate sitting in a folder and a story you can tell a line manager, or bring into a performance review, that shows intent and growth.
Josh’s own decision to complete a professional coaching and leadership qualification came from a gap he’d identified in his experience: leading work, but not people. The qualification didn’t teach him something from nothing, it gave him the evidence and the language to show he could do it.
6. Good enough, agreed as a team, is genuinely good enough
The Q&A brought some of the sharpest moments of the session. One associate asked how to handle a project with three teams and no clear ownership over a shared data pipeline. Josh’s response was to keep asking questions rather than assuming a fix: who owns this data, where does it originate, and could space be made for a simple validation step closer to the source. Visibility, he argued, turns an unowned problem into one that at least has a starting point.
Another associate asked how to hold a high personal quality bar without making colleagues feel confronted. Josh’s suggestion was to swap judgement for curiosity: ask what the other person was trying to achieve, rather than saying it isn’t good enough. And on perfectionism more broadly, his view was blunt and reassuring in equal measure: perfection isn’t a real destination. Good enough, agreed as a team, is genuinely good enough.
The takeaway
Working smarter, not harder isn’t a single trick. It’s a set of habits: knowing what you own, asking rather than telling, treating every piece of work as if someone depends on it, and turning what you learn into a story you can tell. You can watch the whole chat on your YouTube here.
Thank you to Josh for being so generous with his time and experience, and to everyone who came along, asked questions, and made the session what it was.
Keep an eye out for details of our next Skills Summit, and get in touch if you’d like to know more about life as an associate at La Fosse Academy.