Dogfooding: A simple practice to help you build better products

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Agile Insider

6 min readNov 14, 2021

A design review is in progress.

Its me, my boss and the designer. We are looking at the designs for Feature X. The entry point for Feature X seems a bit complicated. There is another Feature Y, which looks like a more natural entry point for Feature X.

I hesitantly ask the designer, “Did you consider Feature Y while building this?”

The designer looks at me, surprised. “Wait, is there a Feature Y in the product?”

We stare at each other in silence.

After the face palm moment is over, I give a walkthrough to the designer of Feature Y.

The meeting ends with another review being scheduled for the next day.

As product builders, its super-important to have a strong working knowledge of the product. Yet, its surprising how often team members are not aware of the standard features in their own product. I have myself been guilty of committing this mistake multiple times.

This lack of knowledge often compounds. Leading to buggy products, usability issues, unscalable features and a subpar user experience.

One simple practice can help avoid this to a large extent. This practice is called dogfooding.

In the subsequent paragraphs, I would take you through what dogfooding is, how it benefits your organization and how to build a strong dogfooding culture in the organization.

What is dogfooding

Dogfooding is the practice of using one’s own products and services.

It means using your products and services in a real-world environment for the same purpose and in the same way your end users would do.

Thus, the goal of dogfooding is not just testing of the app. It is to put yourself in the user’s shoes and see things from their perspective.

Origin of the Term

One possible origin for the term is the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, in which the actor endorsed the product by claiming he fed Alpo to his own dogs.

In 1988, a Microsoft manager challenged another manager to increase internal usage of the company’s product, by sending an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood.” Subsequently, the term’s usage spread throughout the company .— Source

Benefits of Dog Fooding

Dogfooding is much more than testing your product for bugs and usability issues. If done right, it can offer myriad benefits across multiple teams. Dogfooding helps to:

Build ownership and trust in the product — Using the product internally gives a strong signal to everyone that the company believes in the product and its effectiveness. (If you don’t believe in the product, then nobody else will.)
Test features before shipping — A company focused on dogfooding, will beta test any feature internally before releasing it to a customer. Testing the latest features internally helps you iron out flaws in the feature and ship a more finished product. (It also gives you a better idea about the utility of the feature)
Identify bugs and usability issues early on — No product is 100% perfect. It invariably suffers from defects and shortcomings. Using our product on a day-day basis helps identify issues before the customers report them.
Develop Customer Empathy —Dogfooding is a great way to build customer empathy as it helps us see things from the customer’s perspective. We often wonder — Why the customer did this or that, why didn’t they read the manual etc. Using the product ourselves helps us answer all those queries and become more mindful of the customer’s needs.
Improve your Product Understanding — Trying workflows in your product can often be an eye opening experience! Sometimes, we might even have forgotten about the features that exist in the product and how they work. This knowledge is crucial as it can be leveraged while building newer features or enhancing existing ones.
Ease the Support Team’s work — Various questions that customers might come up with are revealed while using the product internally. Some of these can addressed through product improvements while others can be addressed in the help articles that the support team writes.
Sell better — From a marketing perspective, it looks better for you and your organization to use your own tools over those of a competitor. Dogfooding acts as a form of testimonial advertising — If you are using your product internally, it indicates a high level of trust in the product.

Building a strong Dog Fooding Culture in the company

Dogfooding is a belief system that your entire company has to buy into — Ben Fathi (ex-CTO at VMWare)

If dogfooding is not part of the company culture, there might be resistance to getting started. People may say — this doesn’t work properly, that feature is missing etc etc. But every excuse will come to bite you back later on and may become a potential reason for customer churn.

To get started, a top-down approach would be needed. The entire leadership team, starting from the CEO, has to be obsessed with dogfooding. They have to believe in its utility and must align the rest of the organization with this belief.

Dogfooding cannot be limited to the product or QA team. Every individual in the organization should be involved in dogfooding.

Here are some tips which can be help you get started:

Identify how using the product can become part of your routine. (Ours is a product that has video conferencing at its core and we run all our internal meetings on it).
If its a consumer product, there are chances that many employees might prefer using a competing product. Its important to understand the reasons for this and develop a mitigation plan.
Before every new feature release, deploy the feature on a test environment. Share the link with the rest of the organization and request everyone’s help to test the feature thoroughly.
If it’s not possible to use the product as part of your routine, set up a weekly or fortnightly cadence. Test out the standard workflows and new features during this time. (This will give you a fairly good idea of the challenges and questions faced by customers)
Provide an easy way for people to give product feedback. (We use slack for our internal communication and have created a #product-feedback channel for people to share their feedback).

Pitfalls to avoid while dogfooding

Excess of everything is bad. And dogfooding is no different. Over-reliance on it could also be problematic.

Due to familiarity with the product, bugs and usability issues might go unnoticed. When we encounter issues on a regular basis, we might tend to ignore them or find a workaround. Thus, a customer ‘s experience might be markedly different from your experience. [Solution: New team members should be encouraged to use the product and give their feedback]
Target customer segment might get missed — Your employees might not be your target segment. These differences can often lead to differences in the way the product is used.
[Solution: Having a beta testing group comprising customers from the target segment is really helpful]
Release might get delayed —Speed is of essence in a startup. Sometimes, the feedback that starts pouring in is overwhelming. You can’t waste weeks trying to incorporate all the feedback that’s received. [Solution: Classify feedback into Must Haves and Good to Haves. For Good to Haves, don’t delay the release. Instead make them a part of version 2)
Don’t consider it a replacement for proper QA testing — Each employee in the organization has a full time role. They can’t be expected to perform for free, the role of the QA team.

Don’t consider it a replacement for Beta testing — As products start having multiple features and workflows, it would no longer be possible for all the moving pieces to be used internally. Often, many scenarios might never come up during dogfooding. As mentioned above, having a beta testing group comprising customers is vital in this case.
Dogfooding once in a lifetime scenarios: There are events that, although your users will only do once, can have a huge effect on the customer experience. For example — sign-up or onboarding experience. [Solution: Teams should regularly test flows such as sign-up/onboarding to ensure that issues in these flows are not missed.]

Dogfooding is a crucial part of the product improvement strategy but its important to be aware of its limitations.

Conclusion

While looking for complex frameworks and complicated theories, we often forget paying attention to basics.

Using our own products and services is one such basic tactic for knowing your product and customers better. If done well, it can generate exponential returns for all the teams in the organization.

Getting everyone in the team onboard with dogfooding might be cumbersome but the results would definitely be worth it!