Necessary but insufficient. On several projects where I was the lead I started honoring the QA lead's attempts at vetoing a release. I was willing to explain why I thought changes we had made answered any concerns that QA had, or did not, but if the lead said No then I wasn't going to push a release.

If you're consistent about it, you can restore a sizable chunk of power to the QA team, just by respecting that No. With three people 'in charge' of the project instead of two, you get restoration of Checks and Balances. Once in a while Product and QA came to me to ask us to stop some nonsense. Occasionally Product and Dev wanted to know why things were slipping past QA. But 2/3rds of the interventions were QA and Dev telling Product to knock something off because it was destroying Quality and/or morale.

God do I miss QA and being able to go 2 against one versus the person whose job description requires them to be good at arguing for bullshit.