How PMs Can 10x Quality with Dogfooding - Simple Approach, Impressive Results
You Better Eat Your Own Food Before Serving It
How do you create outstanding products?
Many people say you get to understand your customers and their situation and empathize with them, so you’re ready to create what makes sense for them. I agree with that, but maybe we can find a better way.
What if you become your own customer?
When you use the product you create, you will understand the value of it.
There’s a term for that: Dogfooding. Let’s explore it in this post.
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What’s dogfooding?
In short, dogfooding is about using the product or service before releasing it to the market. Why’s that? You will understand the benefits of your offer once you become a customer of it.
Let me share a story to illustrate why dogfooding is highly important.
My favorite restaurant is in a small town in Brazil called “Tio Giuseppe.” What amazes me about this restaurant is the quality and simplicity of its food. When I lived in Brazil, I visited this restaurant whenever I could, and once I talked to the chef. It amazed me what he shared.
For years, the restaurant struggled to thrive. The chef didn’t understand why as they offered many beloved dishes. Yet, customers would barely return. Once, the chef decided to have dinner there and go through the menu, and the result was anything but good. He asked the other cooks to do the same, and the reactions revealed their real problem - the food wasn’t as good as they imagined.
The chef closed the restaurant for two weeks and told the other cooks, “We will create a menu that we love. First, we must love our food, and then customers will be pleased.”
They ran many experiments, removed the menu, and started serving only three dishes: lasagna, spaghetti with organic meatballs, and fish of the day. After that, customers started recommending the restaurant. They loved the new concept and the quality of the food.
How do you apply dogfooding in tech?
Dogfooding isn’t about faking customer behavior to prove yourself right. It’s about becoming your customer and understanding how your product improves your life.
Let’s take an example from Itamar Gilad, former Google Product Manager, in his book Evidence Guided; he shared a story about Gmail. Nowadays, it’s natural for us to get the emails automatically categorized and take it for granted.
The following image reflects my Gmail account. One unread email, a few hundred social emails, and another few thousand promotions, which I ignore. I love this functionality because it avoids distraction and I focus on the emails I care. Yet, how that came to exist is quite interesting.
Itamar was one of the Gmail Product Managers; he shared that back then, emails were crowded, and he noticed people spending considerable time sorting them out. Then, he imagined, “What if we could do it automatically?” That question triggered a series of experiments.
To automatically sort the mailbox, Itamar aligned with the team and agreed to use the new version so they could experience how that would play out. They all used Gmail, and it was natural for them to evaluate the new feature. In the beginning, it was helpful but not as they imagined. So they kept improving it.
Once the functionality reached a level, the team benefited from it every day, and they decided to get customers to use it. At that stage, the functionality was already mature, and it was easier to deliver value to customers.
The role of dogfooding in product testing and development
One of the major benefits of dogfooding is stepping back. When teams don’t practice dogfooding, they may judge that users are wrong because they don’t understand a feature. The team strives to prove themselves right instead of learning what’s not working well. This is detrimental for both sides.
Dogfooding helps us understand customers better because we start wearing their shoes. That accelerates value creation and reduces friction. Yet, it doesn’t mean you can stop talking to customers altogether. Dogfooding isn’t exclusive. It’s complementary. The closer you are to your customers, the better.
Let’s take another example.
37 Signals created Basecamp, which has more than 100K+ paying customers. It’s an all-in project management solution. What’s interesting about it is that 37 Signals uses its tools to run its business and is in close exchange with customers to understand what would make the product better.
Using your product and getting closer to your customer can lead to a product your audience loves.
Analyzing real-life dogfooding sessions
How do you run dogfooding sessions? It differs from situation, but let me give you an overview:
Define: Make it clear what you’re trying out and which job it solves. Remember, it’s about delivering value, not testing the feature.
Testers: Agree on who will use the product. Somewhere between 3 to 10 would be a good starting point.
Time: Establish a window you want to test. This can vary from a single session to days or weeks. I recommend keeping it short to collect insights faster.
Resonance: Let the testers share how the created feature helped them achieve the desired job in real life.
Pattern: Strive to map the identified patterns during the session
Rinse & Repeat: Improve the product based on your learning. You may opt to stop dogfooding if you realize the testers achieved the goal in a satisfactory way. Otherwise, you improve until you’re ready to involve customers.
Understanding dogfooding in the context of testing
Dogfooding is a qualitative test. It will help you know how useful the product or service is. Although it may help you identify bugs and inconsistencies, it’s not a scalable testing method to keep your quality standards high.
In short, dogfooding helps you identify what drives value and iterate until it’s intuitive and easy to use. Before releasing features to your audience, you will benefit from adding test methods like smoke testing, regression testing, and sanity testing.
Conclusion and key takeaways
Is there a better way to understand how useful your product is other than becoming your own customer? Strive to find ways to make that possible, and you will deliver highly valuable products sooner.
For B2B products, the situation is different, but I’d not discourage you from doing all you can to use the product until you understand its benefits.
Here are our takeaways:
Become your customer so you understand how useful your product is
Dogfooding doesn’t replace contact with real customers
You may learn why customers leave you once you indeed use your products
Combine testing practices (smoke, regression, and sanity testing) to increase your software quality
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Dogfooding is usually much easier in B2C than in B2B. That doesn’t diminish the argument, though.