Quality stops being an area the day it stops being only yours
If quality is a department, you have a department. If it is shared, you have a culture.
There is a version of a quality area that works perfectly and still fails: one that is excellent, respected, and the only place in the company where anyone thinks about quality.
That setup caps out. The area becomes the bottleneck it was built to remove, and every improvement has to pass through the same fifteen people.
Shared does not mean diluted
Handing quality to product and development does not mean dissolving the area. It means the area stops being the only one holding the standard and starts being the one that defines it, teaches it and checks it.
The difference shows up in where the argument happens. In the first model, quality argues at the end. In the second, product argues with itself at refinement, and quality is there because it is useful, not because it is a checkpoint.
It is measured by absence
The sign of it working is awkward: fewer things reach quality broken, so the area looks less busy. Anyone judging the team by volume of bugs found will read that as decline.
Be ready for that conversation before it happens, because it will happen, and the honest answer — "the number went down because the work moved upstream" — sounds exactly like an excuse if you say it for the first time under pressure.
The hardest part
Giving away ownership of something you are accountable for. The area still answers for quality, but it no longer controls every decision that creates it.
That is uncomfortable, and it is the only version that scales past the people you can personally hire.
