Eating Our Own Dog Food

The classic philosophy of product development explored

In 1988 an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood” was sent by Paul Maritz, manager at Microsoft to his colleague Brian Valentine.

Valentine’s was a test manager and as people may guess, the email was encouraging the internal use of their own product.

Since then the term is used more widely in jest by tech companies creating new products that in many cases solve problems they face themselves, to promote testing and validating what they are building.

Although it may sound obvious to test something you’re building by using it yourself, the philosophy ranges wider than testing your end-product, and can be the difference between good and great products.

Todays article covers the following:

• Act as your customer

• Act as your user

• From Startups to Big Companies

• Hidden Value

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Act as Your Customer

The obvious lessons of “eating your own dogfood” or using your own product are still valuable and worth mentioning.

Whether a tool or product is intended to be consumer facing, for other businesses or to be used internally, using them as an engineer/product owner/designer are valuable for bug testing and exploring the user experience.

How To Report Technical Issues Efficiently (Template Included)

When testing your own product it is normal to be blind to obvious drawbacks by being naturally familiarised with the system you are working on . It is still a good initial step before more rigorous testing with people not accustomed to what you are building.

When I worked in a 5-person team launching a consumer hardware product with an accompanying app, we would test our application by running it with each of our phones.

These simple tests let us efficiently test if new features would work across different smartphone operating systems and phone models.

For more in-depth testing we would use our product in ways that were less contained and would let us experience our application breaking. While our application was running we would test by:

• Running other apps in the background

• Quitting the app on our phones

• Turning off Bluetooth on our phones

Although these tests would verify that our technology worked with more obscure scenarios, - “eating our own dogfood” also included testing our application for its intended use (which in our case was for assisted mindfulness activities).

What is important to note with acting as your customer, is this is only one application of “eating your own dogfood”.

Act as your User

To act as your user is not always to act as your customer, as your customer is only one user.

If you are building a consumer product, your end product is not the only product or system you can test.

Will Shu, the founder of Deliveroo (UK food delivery app) has said that he still carries out deliveries to test the companies app.

Despite Deliveroo being a consumer facing product, he is testing the user experience for people working for Deliveroo who use the app for carrying out deliveries.

Shu mentions how as well as testing the app’s functionality and reliability, he arrives at restaurants to pick the food up, and occasionally experiences restaurant staff being rude to him.

Although carrying out deliveries helps Shu test the technology the team use on a daily basis, he is also given a unique insight to the day-to-day experiences they face.

The conversation came from a podcast episode I highly recommend from The Diary of a CEO.

For leaders, seeing what challenges your team face offers an opportunity to improve not only the product they are using but more importantly team culture.

From Startups to Big Companies

In scenarios where it is not possible to directly test what you are building it is important to get as strong of an insight as possible.

When working at Siemens Magnet Technology as a Process Engineering Intern, all of my projects were aimed at making the manufacturing process safer or leaner.

One of my projects involved designing and installing small barriers that acted as guides to avoid collisions for trucks carrying big MRI components.

In theory I was given all of the specifications I needed, these included:

• What location on the shop floor I could install them

• What material they could be made from

• What dimensions I could make them

I decided however I wanted to run my design by everyone on the shop-floor who would be working in that area and operating the machinery involved.

Most people had no issues with what I presented to them and some had some helpful pointers about dimensions.

One person told me how if I was to place the barriers where I had intended, he would not be able to lean his workbench against the cylinders which would make his day-to-day slightly less convenient.

This was gold and I found another position that would fit my criteria and theirs too.

The design went from fulfilling engineering criteria to having all users in mind and ensuring no added friction to their process, all thanks to the valuable insight from someone working in that area.

Again, it may seem obvious that there is value in running something your building past people involved in using it but arguably the bigger lesson is that you are taking other peoples thoughts into account when you value their insight.

As Adam Grant writes in his book “Give and Take”, good long-term relationships and generosity should not be valued for their transactional benefits, but they will always result in strong team culture.

Anton Zaides talks more about the value of “givers” and how it is important for managers in his article below.

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Although I was unable to test my design myself, gaining insight from those who would interact with them brought about a stronger user experience and helped strengthen my relationship with others in the company.

Hidden Value

Being focused on product development can run the risk of being isolated from how the end user will use their application.

Testing devices while acting as the end-consumer gives everyone involved in development an idea of what and why they are building their technology.

In all hardware projects I have been a part of having to assemble, solder and setup devices in-house has been valuable when working on longer-term manufacturing plans and has inspired design changes.

In medical device companies I have worked in, involving people working on the manufacturing line in risk-analysis meetings has driven changes to the manufacturing process.

The hidden value of “eating your own dogfood” is a strong customer relationship and team culture.