I love dogfood

Welcome to another edition of Out of Scope!

Software engineers are hungry for excellence. Dogs are hungry for dog food. And software engineers at many companies are hungry to “dogfood.”

I didn’t write any of the above. That was written by the New York Times, trying to explain dogfooding to the masses. I disagree with every sentence. Not everyone is hungry for excellence, dogs are hungry for literally everything, and unfortunately, not enough people are hungry to dogfood. 

For those unfamiliar with the term, and who think this is a pet newsletter, let me clarify. Dogfooding is when you use your own product to uncover issues, look for improvements, and generally ensure your users are receiving the intended experience. It is sometimes called “drinking your own champagne” by people who think they are above eating dog food. Shame.

Why Do It?

There are many reasons to dogfood your product. For me, it’s to build better empathy with my users and to develop a deeper understanding of my product. By dogfooding, it’s easier to find the pain points in the product and where users are getting stuck. And this means it’s easier to think through how to improve it for your customers.

If that’s not enough motivation, it is also a great way to constantly QA your product, especially when your user base might be small and bugs aren’t frequently reported. Duolingo is a huge, publicly-traded company, but even still, so many of their employees regularly dogfood new app builds that they’ve built telemetry tools and dashboards to specifically capture all the dogfooding feedback.

Effort

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to do. Some products are easier to dogfood than others. And so I’ve created categories based on t-shirt sizing for the amount of effort it will take to properly dogfood them. (As a side note, I can’t imagine it’s easy to dogfood dog food if you’re a dog food company since you’re not a dog. Say that five times fast.)

Ways To Make It Fun

Duolingo reportedly hosts a twice-yearly Language Challenge, which provides a financial incentive for employees to dogfood language courses consistently during a 6-month period. Money can definitely make things more fun. At my current company, tendercare, we have a weekly dogfooding challenge, and at the end of the week, the employee who has used the app most (validated by our engineers) wins a small gift. 

There are many other ways you could encourage your teams to dogfood. When the effort is small, you simply need to motivate your peers to use the product, but when dogfooding becomes more difficult, you might need to provide options to make it easier.

And I’ll be honest, some dog food doesn’t even seem that bad to eat.

Reply to this post, and let me know if you found this helpful!