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What is Dogfooding?
“Dogfooding” is slang for the use of an organization’s own products and services in real-world scenarios in the same way as a customer. This can be effective for testing, quality control, and promoting the products or services in question.
What is dogfooding in tech? For IT professionals, the phrase “eating your own dog food” means carrying out operations using internal products or looking at the source code.
In some cases, developers or other company employees use their own products as a form of internal beta testing to work out bugs. Their feedback is then implemented before the products are launched. This offers developers a chance to solve problems before releasing the product to consumers.
In other cases, dogfooding refers to a company using its own solution for the tasks it is designed to address. If software developers are users as well, they are likely to be more invested in the user experience (UX). In this way, dogfooding indicates that a company is confident about its products.
Key Takeaways
- Dogfooding is an important part of development as it allows developers to test products in real-world scenarios to identify bugs and usability issues before release, creating a more reliable product.
- By using the product internally, companies gain valuable insights into the customer experience, making it easier to address pain points and enhance functionality.
- Involving multiple teams or departments in dogfooding helps developers gather diverse feedback, from technical functionality to ease of use.
- Examples of dogfooding include companies like Microsoft and Google requiring employees to use their own software applications rather than third-party products.
- Developers should avoid over-reliance on dogfooding and still need to use other forms of testing as internal feedback can be biased and lack diversity.
Dogfooding Origins
There is some debate over the origin of the term, as some cite a 1976 advertisement in which the actor Lorne Greene claimed he fed Alpo dog food to his own dog; others point to a 1980 memo circulated by Apple CEO Michael Scott that the company would no longer buy typewriters and instead use its own word processors; and others refer to a story that Clement Hirsch, who founded Kal Kan Pet Food in the 1930s, ate a can of the company’s dog food at shareholders meetings.
The term gained momentum in the technology industry in 1988 following an internal message from Microsoft executive Paul Maritz titled “Eating our own dog food,” encouraging employees to use the company’s software.
Why is Dogfooding Important?
Dogfooding is an important part of a company’s quality testing, playing a role in verification and validation before a product or service is released to external users.
Employees using the product or service gain firsthand experience of its strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to provide feedback that developers can incorporate before it is launched to the public. This is crucial for identifying issues that may not be seen during development but become evident during real-world use.
By experiencing the product from the customer’s perspective, the company can ensure that its user experience is as intended, and it can promote the product’s features based on real use cases.
Dogfooding also allows employees to benefit from the product features the company has created to accomplish their own work. They can speak about the product more knowledgeably, as they are likely to be among the most active users.
Who Implements Dogfooding?
There are several departments that can implement dogfooding:
Why is Testing Your Own Product Important?
Internal testing is important as it allows developers to understand how the product performs in real-life applications, create more user-centered designs, and identify and fix coding bugs.
Feedback from dogfooding in software development can be valuable for refining an application before launch, increasing its chances of success in the market by making it as effective as possible for its intended audience.
4 Ways to Perform Dogfooding
Here are four ways to implement dogfooding effectively:
Before launching to customers, have company employees test the product, report bugs, and provide UX feedback to ensure it works as intended.
Recreate environments in which customers are expected to use the product. Test the product or service under different conditions, such as on various types of devices or with poor Internet connectivity, to anticipate user challenges. Involve different departments to test the product from different perspectives.
Encourage employees to use the company’s product in their own work. For instance, if the company produces workflow management software, employees should use it to manage their tasks. Customer support teams should use the product regularly, so they can encounter common issues and provide better customer service.
Conduct regular employee surveys to gather feedback on their testing and use of the product to identify areas for future improvement.
Dogfooding Examples
Shortly after the release of Google Apps in 2006, Google became one of the first and largest businesses to switch to the product from using an internal corporate webmail system, an internal instant messenger and a third-party calendar. “We wanted to demonstrate that we believe so strongly in this product that we run our own company on it,” said Douglas Merrill, Google vice president of engineering at the time.
Ride-hailing service Lyft runs a dogfooding program that requires employees, including executives, to spend at least four hours every quarter as Lyft drivers. This enables them to understand the company’s drivers’ experience and identify performance issues.
Since the 1988 dogfooding memo, Microsoft has used the technique to test every product release and requires employees to use its software products internally, such as Outlook and Teams.
Dogfooding Benefits and Risks
Pros
- Saves on development costs
- Reduces the number of bugs that customers encounter
- Promotes a collaborative work environment
- Fosters customer-centric company culture
- Focuses teams on product quality
- Scales testing environments
- Eliminates the need to purchase third-party products
- Demonstrates confidence in the company’s own product
- Enhances product marketing
Cons
- Targeting the wrong users
- Relying on feedback from employees already familiar with the product
- Internal bias
- Over-reliance and skipping QA assurance or other forms of testing
- Overlooked scenarios
- Lack of diversity among users
- Loss of internal trust if employees use early, bug-filled versions
- Delayed product release, slowing time-to-market
- Distraction from core job responsibilities as employees focus on testing
The Bottom Line
The definition of dogfooding is a form of internal beta testing that helps companies improve their products and services to meet the needs of users in real-life situations. By using their own products, companies can ensure that they work as intended, are user-friendly and relevant to their target customers.
Dogfooding enables cost savings, pre-launch bug fixes, internal product knowledge, and enhanced collaboration. However, it also presents challenges such as bias and a lack of diversity. To be effective, dogfooding should form part of a company’s broader development and testing strategy.
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References
- Google Apps (Google)
