Don’t Just Eat Your Own Dog Food. Sell It.
Know what Gmail, Slack, Basecamp, Trello, and AWS have in common? They were all developed as internal tools first, and then released to the broader market.
Plenty of companies get the first part right — but releasing their internal tools to the open market? It’s downright heresy in most organizations. This is a flaw in org design and decision making that is costing firms millions.
Here’s how it happens…
Someone sees the need for a new tool. Maybe it’s a performance development app. Maybe it’s for team collaboration. Maybe it's a knowledge management system. It doesn’t matter. The need is real.
Then a choice is made that has lasting consequences: to build it internally. The most popular reason? Data security. But other reasons pop up as well. Maybe the requirements are so specialized that nothing external fit the bill. Maybe it’s more cost effective to build it in house. Maybe all this digital innovation is too enticing to watch from the sidelines. Whatever the reason, suddenly they’re in the software development game.
Months (and maybe years) pass building the new wonder tool. Perhaps even using agile or lean practices with plenty of internal user input and iteration. Finally, it is launched with much fanfare. A new thing!
Fast forward six months. Somehow, that dream of an internal tool that everyone used and loved has evaporated. Many employees aren’t using it at all. Some are using it under duress. A few are even using competitive products from the outside. Don’t they know that the company has its OWN solution?!
Here’s the problem…
Evolution tells us that things get better when they iterate in response to market forces. Unfortunately, the mandatory internal tool has no real market forces acting upon it. The team behind it is getting a tiny sliver of the feedback, data, and pressure that a venture-backed team would receive in the wild. Sure, the tool might have 100,000 users, but these users are homogenous, incentivized, and biased in so many ways, their data simply doesn’t represent market dynamics.
Over time, the tool will face further headwinds. The market, unbound by a single user base, powered by the strongest technical talent, and incentivized to grow tools that work at scale, will continue to innovate. Release after release, competitor after competitor, the pace of innovation outside will lap innovation inside. At that point, internal users will either defect en masse, or further sour on the tool they are being forced to use. Sound familiar? Imagine trying to outdo Slack by building an internal chat tool (good luck). Let’s assume that those competitive dynamics exist (or will exist) for almost anything you could build. This is not for the faint of heart.
So, what are the alternatives?
Option 1. COMMIT TO FINDING A SOLUTION IN THE MARKET. We live in the age of apps — there is quite literally an app for everything. Use a comparison site like Alternative To and try everything you can get your hands on. Make your choice based on your internal criteria, sure, but also these two variables: ease/joy of use and rate of iteration. The best tools are a pleasure to use and push updates early and often. If security is truly an issue, spend the money you would have spent developing an app working with an existing player on making their tool enterprise ready. The best part of selecting a purpose built, healthy, and growing tool is that while you pay the same fee every month, it’s getting better all the time. What’s more, you retain the most valuable feature of all — the ability to walk away when something better comes along.
Option 2. BUILD IT AND LET THEM COME. If the market can’t satisfy your needs, and building something is imperative, make the commitment to not just “dog food” your product (the term developers coined for using their own tools), but to release it to the market — maybe as an open source project, or even better, as a SAAS or ad supported solution — and challenge your team to do the only reasonable thing… make the best tool in the world. The best part about building a tool that the world loves is that it changes and shapes your business. In the case of 37 Signals, it changed them from an agency to a software company. In the case of Gmail, it broadened the scope of Google’s dominance in web-based software. There’s no telling how it might impact you, but if you can succeed in making something people use, you’ll win.
The future of work is about continuous steering, organizing around value creation, and adapting to market feedback and signals. When we centralize or isolate our work without careful consideration, we open ourselves up to gaps in learning that can slow or stall our products and projects. Our companies are networks, but they are also nodes in a bigger network — and we need to open ourselves up to the solutions, and the customers, that wait outside our walls.
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