The tester should be pro-active to understand the product, its scope, testing scope, on-going changes in the product i.e.,

1. What the product is?
2. Why this product needed? (What are the business drivers for this product?)
3. Who are the customers? How they will deploy in their environments and use?
4. When all this product will to be used?

5. How the product is Architected? How this Architecture fits for our purpose? How different components in the product communicate?
Example: if the product is built as a strong security Server then How this Architecture is providing the required security ? etc

6. identify the SCOPE of the testing i.e.
Are the product requirements Clear, Correct & Completely specified?
what quality characteristics needs to be tested in this product?

Quality characteristics can be: Correctness, Completeness, Reliability, Security, fault-tolerant, Performance (CPU, memory utilization etc), usability, Adaptable to multiple environments etc.

Why so many Quality characteristics?
Correctness, Completeness, Reliability gives value to the product. And other characteristrics Add Value to the Product.

7. Tester should be pro-active in verification of the balance of these Quality characteristics.

What do u mean by balance of Quality characteristics?
Example: Performance Vs Reliability:
If we want to improve the performance of the product in I/O activities then we may prefer to have Cache in between. The cache will helps in reducing the IO activities since the data will be transferred to the database once in a while.

But what happens if we lose the cached data (due to power failure etc) before transferring to the database? the product reliablity is lost.
So one characteristic is affecting the other characteristic.

So, to increase the performance and at the same time maintaining reliability requires the balance of these 2 characteristics in the product design.

7. What are the 3rd party tools used? What are their limitations? Is they affecting the balance of Quality?

8. Make sure all the stakeholders are in sync with ‘What the final product will be’ i.e, the required requirements, plan, design, implementation etc

All this info will help to do better testing. And this collection of info requires pro-activeness.

The following sentence in Creativity needs clarification:
Testers need to think beyond what is expected of the software and its users.

What does it mean?

but I somehow cant agree fully to 1st point. why should tester test beyond requirement? the scope should be the limit. but yes we need to find the smarter combinations in that.