Sounds just like every regular software project. That’s why cutting QA is a bad idea for every regular software project. Same goes for product management, unless you are Google and can afford building products people don’t need.

We’ve never had a QA because we are on a tight budget but our PM is acting as a gatekeeper before declaring something as done.

However, there were too many cases that things were delivered as “ready” when they were not. PR review was not enough as everyone were checking diffs from GitHub only.

I implemented an intermediate step where the responsible engineer must post a screenshot or a short video of the ticket before passing to the PM and that alone resolved a lot of issues before they materialized on customers screens, just because you must take the extra effort to work on a proof of work.