The world of product and service development today has seen many new methodologies emerge to help businesses operate more effectively. Dogfooding is one such methodology.
Eating your own dog food
Dogfooding, or “Eating your own dog food,” refers to when an organization uses its own products or services in day-to-day operations (real-world scenarios). It’s comparable to a dog food manufacturer—if they don’t test it themselves, they have no way of knowing what it’s actually like, and can only hope for positive feedback when customers buy it for their pets. This term does not include restricting access to competitors’ products within the organization. For example, Coca-Cola might not allow its own employees to drink Pepsi, but that example would not be considered dogfooding.
Since the term “dogfooding” might not sound particularly appealing, many alternative terms have been proposed, such as “Drinking our own champagne,” “Icecreaming,” and “Eating your own cooking”—feel free to use whichever suits you best, as the core idea remains the same. The main benefit of applying this principle is that we gain a deeper understanding of what our users actually encounter during their experience, as well as what might still be missing, so we can further improve our product or service. Additionally, if any issues arise, we can catch and fix them early. From another perspective, this approach can also be seen as a kind of employee benefit, offering free or discounted access to the organization’s own products or services.
Example of an organization that uses it: Apple
Apple is well known for encouraging employees to use its own products, offering various discounts as incentives for staff to purchase them. Sales employees, for instance, gain a better understanding of customer sentiment and deeper product familiarity. Developers, meanwhile, can identify bugs and opportunities to enhance the software in meaningful ways.
Caveats
While this method offers many advantages, caution is still warranted—particularly regarding bias that can arise among those who built the product or service themselves. Even though they may be able to spot various issues, they might overlook usability concerns because they already know exactly how to access every feature, having developed it themselves. One possible solution can be seen in the approach taken by JetBrains, a company that develops IDEs (programs used for software development) and also practices dogfooding. Before releasing a stable version, they create a program called EAP (Early Access Program), allowing users to try pre-stable versions for free in exchange for reporting bugs and providing feedback on various aspects of the program. Users in the EAP certainly won’t carry the same biases as the developers.
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