Short take: Are You Eating Your Own Dog Food?
Some years ago, my Engineering Manager told me: “We need to eat our own dog food more often” If you are as confused as I was at the time, this article is for you.
What is Dog Fooding?
There is no consensus on who coined this term first, and there are some stories, such as the one about Clement L. Hirsch, president of Kal Kan Pet Food in the early 20th century, who was said to eat the food they produced in shareholder meetings to prove he believed in the quality of their products.
How this phrase made it to tech is not entirely clear, but what is clear is that as a product manager, one of your key responsibilities is to identify opportunities for improvement in your product. One effective way to achieve this is to use your product regularly, allowing you to experience it from the user's perspective. This is where "dogfooding" or "eating your own dog food" comes in.
The concept of dogfooding is simple: As a product manager, you should use your product as if you were the customer. This means putting yourself in the shoes of your users and experiencing the product as they would. By doing this, you gain a deeper understanding of the user experience, which can help you identify pain points and areas for improvement.
Dogfooding is not just a strategy for product managers. It has been used by companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google to improve their products. For example, Michael Scott, Apple's President in 1980, sent an internal memo to the company saying that they should not buy or lease typewriters to prove that word processing is the future.
Dogfooding in your organization
Implementing dogfooding in an organization can be a significant challenge. It's crucial to create a culture where all roles, not just the product manager, understand the value of using the product as if they were the customer. Encouraging designers, engineers, and QA to participate is essential. By doing so, they can gain a deeper understanding of the user experience, which will ultimately help them create better products.
Dogfooding is not just about blindly going through critical user flows. Instead, it's about putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and understanding their experience. This means looking at the product from their perspective and trying to identify pain points and areas for improvement. By doing so, the team can improve the product and make it more user-friendly.
QA can significantly benefit from dogfooding too, as it can improve the quality of their test cases. They can gain a better understanding of the user flows, which can help them prioritize user flows accordingly. Additionally, involving other roles in dogfooding sessions can be a helpful approach. By getting feedback from different perspectives, the team can work together to identify and solve issues.
If the product is not something you would use every day or if you are not the ideal customer, using the sandbox environment can be a helpful approach. Before embarking into the dogfooding journey make sure that you have data that is similar to what a real customer would find in the platform, and then think about some tasks they should be able to do. It's important to note that dogfooding doesn't replace user interviews or testing. Instead, it complements them by allowing you to empathize with the user and gain a better understanding of their experience.
At least for me, giving this process a name helped me to share the idea and not forget to use the product regularly for research purposes.
Key takeaways
Dogfooding is the practice of using your own product as if you were the customer.
It can help you gain a deeper understanding of the user experience and identify pain points and areas for improvement.
Encouraging all roles, not just the product manager, to participate in dogfooding sessions is essential for creating a culture of user-centricity.
Dogfooding should complement user interviews and testing, not replace them.
If you're interested in learning more about how to improve the product management practice in your organization or want to discuss other product management strategies, consider scheduling a FREE consultation call with me. Let's make the world a better place one product at a time.
Hi Gonzalo.
When you use the product in this way, you approach it from the point of view of a heavy user who explores all de product; a hyperactive QA with 24x7 work; or the typical user who has his own flows. Which of the 3 profiles is better? or you can iterate between one profile and another depending on the releases. A pleasure to read your post, greetings from AQP.