The Power of Dogfooding at Whatnot
Evan Hou| Head Of Analytics
“Dogfooding” — the practice of using your own products — is core to our work at Whatnot. In fact, we encourage all new employees to go live within the first month of starting at the company. Everyone is given a stipend, and expected to use the product often, as both buyers and sellers. Particularly in a remote working environment, familiarity with one’s service can instill confidence and lessen future bugs, increase the velocity of innovation, and even bolster revenue.
As an analyst, dogfooding is especially important as it allows for:
- Creating your own data that you can validate against your actions
- Empathizing with your users to understand their pain points
- Providing on-the-spot and contextual feedback to the team
While dogfooding is well known in the tech world, it has been known to have its limits in terms of how eager an entire employee base is to jump into the user experience day in and day out. In this article, I will share how dogfooding has become a beloved value at the company and helped us better understand the user experience and impact product outcomes.
Creating your own data
When learning a new data model, you are constantly asking yourself if the data is believable. Dogfooding can remove the guesswork by enabling a user-first experience and better-informed testing. This perspective significantly accelerates the learning process because the feedback loop of true data is internalized. In many cases, a team is adding new features and user journeys that need to be reported. If you can’t deliberately create the data story, how can you expect a user to do the same?
Various tools have been created and leveraged to lookup an employee’s data. Executing queries in the Snowflake console is the fastest way to do this but requires domain expertise of our data model. Our dashboarding tool, Sigma Computing, has been deployed to all employees at Whatnot which has democratized our data. The image below shows an example of such a tool where any record of a Livestream View can be found with metadata associated with it such as the number of bids and purchases made.
How empathizing with users can impact the product roadmap
Whatnot is a livestream shopping platform that enables collector communities to grow their passion through live video, chat, and commerce. Experiencing the magic of Whatnot is paramount to understanding why it has been successful. Feeling the pain points quickly teaches us why a user would churn. These learnings can only be made through dogfooding.
As a viewer on Whatnot, the user has a wide spectrum of engagement, from light touch to forming real-world relationships that extend from livestream chat through in-person conventions.
Engaging with chat and connecting with other buyers and sellers has driven analysis that has helped with prioritization in the product roadmap. For example, we’ve identified that buyers who use chat on the same day they purchase spend twice as much as those buyers who do not use chat, which has resulted in greater focus on increasing safety in chat.
Features that have made chat safer as well as more engaging as a result of dogfooding include:
- Ability for sellers to nominate their own moderators
- Highlighted tagging of a viewer
- Muting of inappropriate words and phrases.
Building from a seller POV
Getting familiar with the selling experience has generated several insights that have turned into new features, including auctioning from Livestream. Previously, it would take several clicks to begin the next auction. What seemed like a minor annoyance would actually turn into a significant amount of time lost in the livestream and cut into sellers’ profitability. In response, our product engineering team created the “Run Next” button to streamline all of this action into one click, which resulted in a 30% increase in Orders per Livestream Hour and drove as much as 50% increase in revenue generated by high volume sellers.
Our sellers are hungry for their data. Not only does it help them manage their business but it also identifies ways for them to grow it. Dogfooding as a seller in combination with analysis has illuminated which metrics we prioritize showing to our sellers. The Analytics team found that the amount of time a seller spends Live on Whatnot to be one of the strongest indicators of success. The Livestream Hours metric is now one of the primary metrics we encourage our sellers to grow to increase their sales. Insights like these are also powering an ongoing project to empower our sellers further with data.
Conclusion
The opportunity to work on a product that I love is the main reason why I joined Whatnot. The cycle of experiencing pain points, looking at the data to confirm the experience, and seeing improvements rolled out to our users brings excitement and joy to the team. We are hiring for roles across the company so if this sounds fun to you, check out our careers page.
