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In my experience dogfooding is the only way to build a great product. Without dogfooding features erode. The "oh I haven't tested that in 6 months" happens freq

In my experience dogfooding is the only way to build a great product. Without dogfooding features erode. The "oh I haven't tested that in 6 months" happens frequently. The UX never evolves. I have NEVER worked on a product that got worse when it was dogfooded and I have NEVER worked on a product that consistently got better without dogfooding (sometimes it'll get better but it's always in spurts before going back down again). Dogfooding is so under utilized especially in big companies.

city41 10y ago
Dogfooding only helps here if the dev team's use cases match the users's. Just about every company I've worked at has "dogfooded" its products, but almost always a small subset or even a completely different configuration from a typical customer.
bshimmin 10y ago
Dogfooding is difficult to achieve if you work in a niche industry which has no immediate relevance to your development team. Smart developers who care about what happens beyond the back of their monitor will, of course, quickly learn a lot about the sector, but they're never going to know or care as much as a real user of the product, and they're never really going to have the same interest as they would if they were building a text editor.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Dogfooding does not require interest. Yes something niche that a developer on their own will never use is difficult (I think we had this as some of the previous companies I have worked at). Still, you should get the development team to use and demo the system on a semi regular basis. Make creating project ideas or something that they can use your product to make and play with. Tell them to take off every X hours a week or two weeks or something to ensure they are constantly using the product. It's harder but in my experience it's still necessary. At least I've never seen a good product come from a team that didn't also use the product. That I know of, anyway.

city41 10y ago

Dogfooding only helps here if the dev team's use cases match the users's. Just about every company I've worked at has "dogfooded" its products, but almost always a small subset or even a completely different configuration from a typical customer.

bshimmin 10y ago

Dogfooding is difficult to achieve if you work in a niche industry which has no immediate relevance to your development team. Smart developers who care about what happens beyond the back of their monitor will, of course, quickly learn a lot about the sector, but they're never going to know or care as much as a real user of the product, and they're never really going to have the same interest as they would if they were building a text editor.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Dogfooding does not require interest. Yes something niche that a developer on their own will never use is difficult (I think we had this as some of the previous companies I have worked at). Still, you should get the development team to use and demo the system on a semi regular basis. Make creating project ideas or something that they can use your product to make and play with. Tell them to take off every X hours a week or two weeks or something to ensure they are constantly using the product. It's harder but in my experience it's still necessary. At least I've never seen a good product come from a team that didn't also use the product. That I know of, anyway.