“Dogfooding” describes the use of your new product by your own team before releasing it to the public. It’s sometimes phrased as “eating your own dog food” or “employee product testing.”
Although dogfooding is a simple concept, many companies are missing out on the benefits that come from using their own products and testing them internally.
Dogfooding drives internal alignment in your company by increasing each department’s knowledge of the product, centering the customer experience, and giving employees a say in product development. To gain the benefits of “eating your own dog food,” you need to know its purpose and the common problems product managers face during implementation.
“Dogfooding” describes the use of your new product by your own team before releasing it to the public. It’s sometimes phrased as “eating your own dog food” or “employee product testing.” Internal use of your own product helps you resolve issues or bugs before launch, shorten the feedback loop, and create a shared product experience between your employees and customers.
The term “dogfooding” may have originated from an account of the president of Kal Kan, a pet food manufacturer, eating a can of the brand’s dog food during a shareholders’ meeting. Or it may have come from a 1976 Alpo commercial featuring actor Lorne Greene. In the television spot, Greene says he actually feeds his dog, Colonel, Alpo dog food—it’s not just a gimmick.
Regardless of whether the term should be attributed to Kal Kan or Lorne Greene, it became an industry term for internally trying out products before they hit shelves (or computer screens).
By feeding Alpo to his own dog in the commercial, it’s become the symbol (and the namesake) for trialing a product internally before it goes to market. Nearly 40 years later, “eating your own dog food” is a widely accepted practice inside most organizations.
In software development, “dogfooding” has become synonymous with using your own product by making it a staple of your tech stack or running a beta test with employees.
Companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and DoorDash, for instance, use dogfooding to create customer-focused products. Microsoft, in particular, has been recommending dogfooding since (at least) 1988.
When employees use the same product they are selling, marketing, creating, or otherwise contributing to, they have a much more in-depth understanding of what their customers need and want than someone who doesn’t use the product. This level of empathy improves the product overall and creates a better customer experience.
There are several departments that could own the dogfooding program at your company, including UX, IT/support, quality assurance/quality control, or product management. If you’re a startup, dogfooding may be part of your beta test.
To decide who should run your dogfooding program, consider which department has the time to invest in managing beta tests, understands the customer experience, and knows how changes will impact the user. Your choice also needs to be able to communicate needed changes in a way that departments with different specializations can understand.
Your user experience team is a logical choice for managing your dogfooding program because they have a nuanced view of customer behaviors and product interactions that can help them interpret the feedback more effectively.
Since UX’s purpose is to identify customer needs and solve customer problems, they can apply these same skills to your product and the success of your dogfooding program overall. In turn, dogfooding will help your UX team members gather insights, design improvements, and collect data on user interactions.
Since running the dogfooding program for company use is also a time commitment, UX designers may need help prioritizing tasks.
If you put UX in charge of implementation, consider delegating problem-solving tasks to IT. This will eliminate any roadblocks to correcting code and fixing technical issues and allow the UX team to stay focused on customers.
Of course, your IT department can also be a useful home for your dogfooding program if you’re a tech company that offers a software product. Since IT will be involved in managing bugs and updates after your product is released to the public, it makes sense to involve them in beta testing early on. If IT are the ones facilitating the dogfooding program and organizing the feedback, they’ll have a wider understanding of the overall issues they need to address before launch, which helps them do a better job.
If you don’t involve IT in the development process, though, they may not have the context around the customer experience needed to spot non-technical problems with the product during dogfooding.
The quality control department is close enough to the product to know exactly how it is supposed to work and whether it functions properly. This makes them a great team to take on the dogfooding program at your company. Quality control is equipped to help you find bugs and code issues using their existing evaluation processes.
For tech-focused employees like quality assurance, customer-focused communication may be more difficult. If you use your company’s quality assurance department to manage your dogfooding program, they’ll need to be able to communicate about everyday usability issues as well as technical issues.
Your product management team has the clearest understanding of the customer’s pain points, the company’s goals, the existing workflows, and the product itself. Your product managers know what success for the product looks like, so they can help your company align the product with the user’s needs.
Additionally, because product managers work so closely with the app itself, the feedback loop is even shorter. PMs can usually manage the dogfooding process alongside their normal tasks.
A drawback to assigning dogfooding to your project management team is that they are already working at a fast pace and may not have time to commit to such a big project in a way that does it justice.
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