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>The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out. I don’t know if I’m misu

>The point of dogfooding is that the dog food you make is so damn good your employees prefer it over making lunch boxes or eating out. I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding how you’ve put this, but I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions. Dog-fooding is not a reward for making the best product (though that makes life easier at work), it’s a commitment to improving your own product, and showing that you are willing to live with your own product in order to make it better for your customers.

kqr 4y ago
I phrased it a little oddly. What I mean is that if not even my employees (who hopefully share my ideals and values) volunteer to use my software, I would take that as a strong signal that I've failed to find a sustainable niche in the market, and maybe the right approach is not to force it down people's throats and hope that they can dig me out of my hole, but rather to pivot and ask myself, "what should I have done differently to get a product people want to use, despite technical flaws?" So yes, dogfooding is there to get immediate feedback on technical flaws of an otherwise desirable product. Dogfooding is not there to fix a product--market mismatch. That needs to happen at a different level of development.
rcme 4y ago
> I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions. I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean this as well, but I like GP's point. If you're forcing yourself to use the product to find bugs instead of using the product because it's a great product, then you have problems.
- teddyh 4y ago
  Dogfooding explained by Joel Spolsky in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-of-dogs-in-this-country/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-o...

kqr 4y ago

I phrased it a little oddly. What I mean is that if not even my employees (who hopefully share my ideals and values) volunteer to use my software, I would take that as a strong signal that I've failed to find a sustainable niche in the market, and maybe the right approach is not to force it down people's throats and hope that they can dig me out of my hole, but rather to pivot and ask myself, "what should I have done differently to get a product people want to use, despite technical flaws?" So yes, dogfooding is there to get immediate feedback on technical flaws of an otherwise desirable product. Dogfooding is not there to fix a product--market mismatch. That needs to happen at a different level of development.

rcme 4y ago

> I’ve only ever understood dogfooding to mean that you use your own product to find the bugs, improve the workflow, and encourage feature suggestions. I've only ever understood dogfooding to mean this as well, but I like GP's point. If you're forcing yourself to use the product to find bugs instead of using the product because it's a great product, then you have problems.

teddyh 4y ago
Dogfooding explained by Joel Spolsky in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-of-dogs-in-this-country/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-the-work-o...