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.
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.
1. The idea is not to tie this practice to releases, that's just doing QA. Think of this as a continuous discovery practice.
2. What I'd recommend is:
- As a PM, act as a typical user and focus on critical flows. No specific cadence for this, if you are already a user of your product use it whenever you need to use it. If not between weekly and monthly should be fine.
- You can also act as heavy user who explores all the product, but I'd do this once per quarter or half. The idea is to come up with a continuous improvement backlog regarding UX/UI outside of core user flows or even ideas on which features to sunset.
- I'd encourage the whole team to dogfood from designers to engineers and adjacent departments.
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.
Hi Yvan! thanks for the question.
A couple of comments:
1. The idea is not to tie this practice to releases, that's just doing QA. Think of this as a continuous discovery practice.
2. What I'd recommend is:
- As a PM, act as a typical user and focus on critical flows. No specific cadence for this, if you are already a user of your product use it whenever you need to use it. If not between weekly and monthly should be fine.
- You can also act as heavy user who explores all the product, but I'd do this once per quarter or half. The idea is to come up with a continuous improvement backlog regarding UX/UI outside of core user flows or even ideas on which features to sunset.
- I'd encourage the whole team to dogfood from designers to engineers and adjacent departments.
Hope this helps!
Thanks a lot Gonzalo!