Dogfooding
Dogfooding is the practice of intensively using your own product to understand user pain points and guide development. The best product teams don't just test their product occasionally - they become power users who depend on it daily. This provides the 'realism' needed to build genuinely useful features.
The Guide
3 key steps synthesized from 2 experts.
Use your product intensively every day
Dogfooding isn't a checkbox you tick occasionally - it's a daily practice. Use your product as a real user would, depending on it for actual work. This intensity reveals issues that light usage never surfaces and builds genuine empathy for user struggles.
Featured guest perspectives
"From the very start, our product development process was really about dogfooding, and using the tool intensely every day. And we never wanted to ship anything that wasn't useful to us."— Michael Truell
Require your team to become users
Don't let dogfooding be optional. Require everyone on the product team to actually become users of your product. At Spotify, this meant requiring PMs to start their own podcasts. Until you've experienced the product as a creator, you can't truly understand what to build.
Featured guest perspectives
"I am constantly yelling at my product team who do not have podcasts and being like, I really don't think that you can build the right things. If they talk to users all the time, they see the data, but all of them, once they finally start doing their podcast, they're like, I get it."— Maya Prohovnik
Don't ship what isn't useful to you
Use dogfooding as a quality bar. If a feature isn't useful to you as a power user, question whether it should ship. This creates a high bar that prevents scope creep and ensures everything you build serves real needs.
Featured guest perspectives
"From the very start, our product development process was really about dogfooding, and using the tool intensely every day. And we never wanted to ship anything that wasn't useful to us."— Michael Truell
Common Mistakes
- Treating dogfooding as optional rather than required
- Using the product superficially rather than depending on it
- Relying only on user research without direct experience
- Building features you wouldn't use yourself
Signs You're Doing It Well
- Every team member can describe personal frustrations with the product from daily use
- Feature ideas come from internal usage, not just user requests
- You catch issues before users report them because you experience them yourself
- The team has genuine empathy for users because they share the same struggles
All Guest Perspectives
Deep dive into what all 2 guests shared about dogfooding.
Maya Prohovnik
"I am constantly yelling at my product team who do not have podcasts and being like, I really don't think that you can build the right things. If they talk to users all the time, they see the data, but all of them, once they finally start doing their podcast, they're like, I get it."
Michael Truell
"From the very start, our product development process was really about dogfooding, and using the tool intensely every day. And we never wanted to ship anything that wasn't useful to us."
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