Dogfooding: Why You Should Eat Your Own Dog Food
If your business made a food meant for dog, would you be interested to try it?
Alpo is a company that produce foods for dogs and puppies. In its 1980s commercial, the spokesman, Lorne Greene, advertised he fed Alpo to his own dogs. In the other side of the table, Kal Kan Pet Food’s president was said that he himself ate a can of his dog food in the shareholders meeting. Both events showed us “practice what you preach” in other perspective, or in this case “use what you’ve made”. The events coined us the term Dogfooding, which we use (or test) our products just like what we tell our customers to do.
I’ve met many people that said they never use the product of their company, and they’ve never been encouraged to. In this post, we will learn the definition and the benefits of dogfooding.
How Top Companies Do It
Google employees heavily utilise their products. In their daily life, they use Google Maps to navigate between floors, schedule meeting with Google Calendar, and many more. For newly launched products, they encourage their employee to use it. Of course they have their own test team, but sometimes bugs and corner cases pop up unexpectedly. By having more people using the product, they open up more channels to track bugs and faults.
Microsoft Office team emphasised on dogfooding in using a prerelease product in a production environment. In this case, before end users try the new features or updates, the development team already use them for their works. If anything happens when they use the prerelease version, they will notice it first and prevent the same thing to happen when end users use it.
Lyft CEO, Logan Green, sometimes pick up riders along his way to work. Essentially, he used Lyft in the perspective of driver. Many transportation company also encourages their employees to use the product to commute to work or in their daily life. Rather than trying to compete with competitors, it nurtures empathy in their employees’ minds on how the driver and rider feel.
Benefits of Dogfooding
Help detecting bugs and errors faster
Internal feedbacks are fast. One thing we learn from dogfooding, it’s a method to give another layer of protection to our product. When users encounter any faults on app, they will most likely to stop using the app and not every user will tell the problem to the customer service. Of course we have crash report and other statistics, but hearing it first hand will give more insights that complements the data we have. Dogfooding help the test team to get more information to work on.
Bring more ideas to the whiteboard
Enabling people to use the product will open up the relationship between teams. “Why this feature looks like this?” “How about next time we do it this way”. No matter what position and role someone is, every idea matters. Sure, having too much thoughts and opinion sometimes can be challenging, but it’s always nice to have fresh perspective on what we are delivering to our users. Dogfooding also gives more structure and context to help employees in expressing their ideas.
Feels of belonging
In relation with the point mentioned above, asking opinion from employees is better for the long run. In one way, it helps the higher ups to be more connected to employees below their level and it promotes communication. What must be avoided is the feeling of being pressured to do so. Employees must receive ideal compensation to do dogfooding. Vouchers and coupons can be a way to help. By doing this, employees also receive some benefits that help their work in the way we prove our product helps our users’ needs. In that sense, it also teaches employees of empathy to their users.
When Should We Do It
Dogfooding can be done in any step of product cycle. From the examples above, they emphasised on the prerelease and just-released step, but dogfooding can be performed even if the product or features have been released for a long time. If idea has price, every brain is a goldmine. Sure, idea alone is not enough, so to complement that, company must strengthen value of collaboration and how to elevate the idea. For example, Amazon Prime come from an idea from an employee through the employee suggestion program.
Dogfooding is more than just bug searching method, it’s a process that can deliver great change. Even if you are not encouraged to do so, it’s a way to broaden our perspective and knowledge. Feel free to talk to your UX Designers, Researchers, or Project Managers. They will always welcome any idea with open hands.
Reference
https://instabug.com/blog/dogfooding-examples-whos-doing-it-right
Have you practiced dogfooding? What do you think of this method? Share your thoughts in comments or let’s chat more in linkedin.
