10. Eat your Dog Food
This is the cheapest, fastest, yet the most underrated way to get market insights.
Celebrities often appear in commercials endorsing products you know they won’t use themselves or for their family.
This is why, in 1976, when the brand ambassador for a dog food fed the product to his dog in the commercial, it gave birth to the phrase ‘eat your dog food’ - a symbol for trialing a product internally before it goes to market.
In 2010, AirBnB’s co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky moved out of his 3 bedroom apartment and lived in AirBnBs for a year. He also lists out his own home to experience the life of a host.
DoorDash runs a program called WeDash that enlists employees to complete deliveries. Microsoft requires Windows teams to install the latest versions on their computer and use Office for all documents.
What inspired me to write this newsletter was this blog post from Duolingo describing the deep dogfooding culture that has helped them become a better company -
At Duolingo, everyone is encouraged to dogfood, not just those building user-facing features. Right now, more than 70% of the company are dogfooders, including our CEO, who dogfoods our app every day across multiple courses on multiple device types 😮
DogFooding is the cheapest and fastest way to get market insights and improve your products, yet the most underrated one.
DogFooding helps organizations to -
Quickly improve product quality through internal bug discovery.
Promote awareness of the product functions and increase customer empathy.
Break down departmental silos and makes everyone customer-centric
Protect brand reputation with fewer bugs discovered after release.
Dogfooding also helps internal teams in the following ways -
UX team can quickly gather insights on design improvements.
Marketing can get feedback on messaging and copy.
Bug discovery enables Tech to do quick code evaluation.
The customer support can polish the FAQs before the product is launched
Here are a few tips for implementing this fantastic insight-generation process in your organization -
Make one department in charge - either UX/product or marketing.
Identify how using the product can become part of employee routine. For example, if it is a banking app, employee benefits could be disbursed through it.
Before every new feature release, share the link of the test environment with the rest of the organization and request everyone’s help to test the feature thoroughly.
Create a dedicated channel where everyone can report internal bugs easily, for example, a #product-feedback slack channel.
Make it fun by launching an internal bug bounty program.
Remember that Dogfooding is not a replacement for proper QA and beta testing. Due to familiarity with the product, some usability issues might go unnoticed. Also, employees might not be the target segment of the product, which would lead to differences in how the product is used.
Finally, to make DogFooding successful, the CEO and the entire leadership team must believe in its utility and participate in it actively.