8 ms·

Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts

368 points by ColinWright 7mo ago

LocalH 7mo ago
But my own farts smell good
- dekken_ 7mo ago
  of course they do, until you're sick and then, you know something's off...
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  Yes. Talking about it is taboo, but it is quite a common phenomenon when people like the smell of their own farts and bodily odors.
  - MathMonkeyMan 7mo ago
    As my high school friend said "Everybody likes their own brand." Consider the alternative.
bryanrasmussen 7mo ago
currently on the front page the post directly beneath this one was 25 years of eggs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224 a happy coincidence.
mpalmer 7mo ago
Dogfooding was a virtuous cycle for user and service provider alike, because incentives were aligned. Then growth - excuse me, metastasis - came along. Thanks to metastasis - excuse me, enshittification - we've outgrown dogfooding. We'd used it as a kind of UX gyroscope, something that works to keep us balanced without too much institutional thought or effort. It made us more efficient at competing. Now that the biggest firms are the least threatened by competition, why would they subject themselves to the indignities of the User?
chromacity 7mo ago
I agree with the broader point, but I'm perplexed that the author is talking about dogfooding as a "sacred practice in the tech industry" in the context of customer support. Among big tech companies, customer support usually isn't seen a part of the product. If you work at Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, you don't try to go through the non-existent consumer support channels to resolve issues with your account.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- schiffern 7mo ago
  Exactly. That's the "smelling your own farts" part.
- Kwantuum 7mo ago
  Interestingly, in the company I currently work for, if an employee encounters a problem with the product, the expected way to report the issue is to open a ticket. Not in an different system with different people responsible for handling it, in the same ticketing system that customers use.
cainxinth 7mo ago
I’m the kind of person that just assumes customer service is going to be bad. I gird myself whenever I have to call a company and just deal with their gauntlet with patience, knowing the trick is to outlast them. It costs them money every time you call. I’ll often tell them I know that and assure them I will continue calling until the matter is resolved. It’s not fun, it’s just the way things sadly are. My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”
- jmbwell 7mo ago
  I get it. I also know customer service is a pretty low paying job for something that involves being yelled at all day I get as frustrated as anyone, but it’s not the fault of the person whose job it is to take my call. I remember once on the phone with Comcast I just explained the situation and jokingly said look, if it helps, feel free to tell ‘em I’m yelling and screaming. The guy laughed. An engineer called me an hour later with a firmware update for my modem. Sometimes there’s no winning. But sometimes it helps if you can put people on your team
  - sgarland 7mo ago
    Yep. When I’m frustrated on the phone with a rep, I always make sure to say something like “I understand this isn’t your fault, but I’m very frustrated with X.” It seems to ease the tension a bit, anyway.
  - carlosjobim 7mo ago
    Angry customers aren't at fault. If all customers are mad as hell when they call, then the company will have to start paying better wages to keep customer support staff from quitting, and they'd rather fix the problem before doing that.
- justonceokay 7mo ago
  The new feature of the iPhone where you can put a phone tree on hold until a person answers is very nice. I had a kerfuffle with Delta airlines along with a few thousand other people some days ago. I had to hold for 2.5 hours, but I spent it catching up with my dad and then my phone rang when the CSA was ready for me. I was so fresh and bright on the call I got an upgrade pretty much just for not being a bitch.
emerongi 7mo ago
My farts always smell good to me.
- forinti 7mo ago
  My dad used to joke that "[Citroen] 2CVs and farts, only the owner enjoys".
  - emerongi 7mo ago
    Exactly. I like my own farts and I don't mind that everyone else thinks it stinks. I find the title not very well thought through, because smelling your own farts is unlikely to lead to change.
bix6 7mo ago
Yeah well economies of scale matters more than your sanity
mrweasel 7mo ago
Two stupid calls I've had: 1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that. 2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online. The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people. Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.
- consp 7mo ago
  The worst one I've had is that after waiting for about 10 minutes, it passed through to a person who pushed me through the another department, only to end up in the same preselect menu I started the call with but with another option selected which points me to a website where you must enter your question and get an email back with the request to call the service desk and select the option I took in the first place. The circle of help desk life. Kafka would be proud. This is likely due to them merging two help desks into one making the second part useless as they can no longer see the data they need and thus canceling it entirely since it didn't get the right metrics. Also turns out that calling the competitors help desk is more useful as they can actually see the thing I was interested in as it is shared between them (fiber connections work schedule when they start to dig, hint they weren't going to). Can't use the competitor since the connections are monopolies...
treetalker 7mo ago
Case in point, may every book the author picks up be designed like his website.
- edent 7mo ago
  Did you, by any chance, hit the "Drunk UI" option on a previous visit? If so, click one of the other themes at the top.
afarah1 7mo ago
Ah, so the minutes long wait hearing answering machine bs is a universal experience. I thought it was a local thing and limited to ISPs, utilities, and financials... When I can choose between competing companies, having a direct line to a human for customer support is at the top of my list. I'm happy with either chat or phone, I just don't want to go through a bot first.
MitchSaid 7mo ago
Some years back I was introduced to UK service consultancy Vanguard (and their "Vanguard Method"), essentially a systems thinking approach to improving service (not to be confused with the enormous US investment management company). In their world, "smelling your own farts" (ie. listening to and, more importantly, understanding what matters to your customers using normative learning methods) isn't primarily about empathy, it's about getting knowledge so you can understand how to intervene in your company as a system. Put that way, it's not a waste for decision-makers to listen to customer phonecalls, it's in fact the only way for them to gain the knowledge they need to understand what to do to improve their service (assuming that's their goal).
Aurornis 7mo ago
> There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer. One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires. In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.
- xingped 7mo ago
  Amusing you picked that quote to quote because your job description is a dead ringer for Amazon work culture.
  - pengaru 7mo ago
    I suspect it's a dead ringer for Corporate America at any large American company.
    - xingped 7mo ago
      Mostly yes, I was just pointing out the irony of quoting Bezos as if Amazon isn't exactly the same problem (if not one of the worst of them all).
- Twirrim 7mo ago
  About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison. They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch. I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
There was a famous Brown and Williamson phone message, from late last century: https://nypost.com/1999/09/23/smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-when-you-call-bw/ https://nypost.com/1999/09/23/smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-when-y... I actually have a recording of it (scratchy), but won't link it, because it's probably not worth it. It was a riot.
- Quarrelsome 7mo ago
  > “The idea came from the women who answer the phones,” said Brown and Williamson spokesman Mark Smith. Very cool that they did something that wild by trusting the judgement of their call centre employees.
GuestFAUniverse 7mo ago
It's the same horse manure, when architectonauts and developers aren't responsible for the operation of their Goldberg-inventions. Another phrase that comes to mind is: no skin in the game. To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 7mo ago
  Maybe "moral hazard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
blfr 7mo ago
With a mass product we're all at the mercy of the bottom quantile or even vigintile. These are the people who need to hear about checking website, collecting basic information, etc. Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service. Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc. There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.
chanux 7mo ago
Whenever I have to call an IVR system for support it puts me in a blood rage 98 out of 100 times. This space is the ultimate dark pattern mine field. My common interactions were with banks and telco companies. Absolute trash. I'm pretty sure some systems allowed remembering the DTMF menu and press it while the voice recording played. But the recent systems I called did not allow this. It was like they intentionally made people wait to suffer the torture. People call these systems as a last resort (At least I do). It should be illegal to make them so bad. Also, I used to work with Telco side guys of these systems and they were very proud of these "capabilities". Sorry for the rant. I had to vent it out.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
joemazerino 7mo ago
The age old problem. Customer service isn't supposed to be mind numbingly unfathomable, and responding to customers should be easy. Unfortunately, unless higher management engages (is that Bezos or Gates? I've heard both) things will get lost in the mix.
skeeter2020 7mo ago
In my last role (engineering side) the VP of Product objected to me using the phrase "eating your own dogfood" because it was "gross" and she always interjected and replaced it with "drink your own champagne". I countered (privately) that was a feature; it's supposed to be a little unappetizing because you're early, building empathy and getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!). I think the difference in perspective succinctly illustrates the schism between trying to understand the customer experience asap, and the data-driven, kpi crowd where - conveniently - you can't discover these issues until it's too late.
- strix_varius 7mo ago
  I've heard exactly the same response before and I shared your reaction. The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
  - thevinter 7mo ago
    Yes but isn't it a bit weird to be implying your customers are dogs?
    - voidfunc 7mo ago
      Our customers are morons for using our products and dogs are personable but pretty stupid so yea, makes a lot of sense.
      - nandomrumber 7mo ago
        [flagged]
    - Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
      Metaphor confuses, literally.
    - Quarrelsome 7mo ago
shevy-java 7mo ago
Customer service has different meanings. Personally I prefer good, simple and effective documentation. I hate having to use a phone to explain problems. It's ok to do it in person, but not my preferred way. > It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey. I kind of prefer companies that build products that never ever need anything. Not even warranty calls, because the thing just keeps on working. What I noticed in the last few years was that we are too dependent on google search. Now that it sucks, finding high quality information has become harder - and AI trend is further ruining this, as everyone just has the AI summarize stuff now, which does not always work either.
- Telaneo 7mo ago
  > Customer service has different meanings. Personally I prefer good, simple and effective documentation. I hate having to use a phone to explain problems. It's ok to do it in person, but not my preferred way. Same. If things have gotten to the point where I need to talk to a human (either or phone or mail) to be made whole, the product has already failed and I should look for alternatives the next time I need whatever it may be.
daneel_w 7mo ago
To me, "dogfooding" isn't using your own product out of loyalty or some nondescript principle, as the author suggests. It's specifically about using your own product during its development as a means of testing while it's in its worst phase - literally eating dog food for a while.
herodotus 7mo ago
And lying: "Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed". Only once did I get what everyone should use instead: "Please listen carefully to be sure you make the right selection". (Lying is also normalized by "I have read and agree to ....". Maybe better would be: "By clicking this box, you are agreeing to our needlessly lengthy terms, whether or not you have read them."
arkensaw 7mo ago
best HN headline of 2026
sauercrowd 7mo ago
This describes quite well the huge advantage small companies have vs big companies. (Motivated) people at small companies "care", and what I mean with that is they are responsible and can see a large enough portion of the customer experience that - if something is broken - they'll see the pain and try to address it. At a big company no one cares. They of course care about their job, but their job is such a small fraction of the overall customer experience, that seeing their work having an impact on their customer is exceptionally difficult. That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.
- throwaway416430 7mo ago
  I manage post sales support at a small company where this theme is present, however, I'm concerned that things may be slipping in the wrong direction. I need help dealing with this situation. Our software engineering team is burdened with tech debt and aggressive product roadmap. Understandably, they often feel the need to push back and keep things under control. Our customers and the employees who are accountable to our customers literally lose sleep when things aren't going well. Our engineering team feels complacent to function on a 9-5 schedule and sleep on critical issues for weeks. The only thing the engineering team appears motivated to actually own is the next iteration of the escalation process that somehow makes them even less accountable. Invariably the next iteration includes adding more details to Jira tickets that nobody will read. Basically no one on that team is dogfooding the product. Broken features are being shipped and they are expecting us to actually sell and support this.
  - sauercrowd 7mo ago
    Here's what I'd suggest 1. There needs to be reframing of the engineer role in the team, by the leadership. It's not just to build things, but to help the customer. The job of the engineer is to build a good product for the customer, not just to "build", fix Jiras, ... 2. At the same time, get some engineers on customer calls. It doesnt need to be everyone, but you need to shorten the feedback cycle that engineers directly get signal from their users. A lot of information gets lost through Jira's, intermediates, ... They dont have need talk, just listen. Will they pay attention? That comes back to the reframing of their job being to create a good product for users. If everyone understands that's the goal, they will. If you have engineers building custom extensions for your database, because your CRM product needs some low level performance optimizations - it'll still be good but less interesting. The goal is to get some engineers talking to customers, cause they'll talk to other engineers. And engineers know how to talk to engineers. It'll shorten the feedback cycle, and that's good for both speed + signal. Now I don't know how much of that you already do, and they might even do all these things already, and what you see is the output of the worst issues already taken care of. If the latter is the case, there's some more cross team comms needed
schiffern 7mo ago
"Eat your own dog-food and smell your own farts" is just crass enough that people will actually remember and retell it. Nice work by the author's Comparative Memetics Division. "Eat your own dog food" == experience your own product. "Smell your own farts" == experience your entire product, including things that are typically unmentionables like customer service and billing
- derriz 7mo ago
  The phrase is striking but doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Companies make dogfood and sell it and expect others (dogs, who aren't known for verbalizing dissatisfaction with their food) to consume it. The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is. But I can't imaging a business which involves collecting farts and selling them to others and where sniffing a small quantity of each bottled fart would help improve production processes to ensure a better experience for the customer. And most people are appalled at the smell of others' farts but can tolerate their own, so the "smell your own" test wouldn't really tell you anything.
  - whamlastxmas 7mo ago
    I think the metaphor is less about what you sell and more about the bullshit your customers have to endure to use the product you provide
  - schiffern 7mo ago
    >The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is. Bingo. This is why "eat your own dog food" works so well. The best koans and parables include a contradiction, which is a teaching tool not a logic bug. You may think you don't need to eat your own dog food (just like the dog food companies), but actually you should still do it.
    - johnisgood 7mo ago
      I am surprised there are so many people on HN that completely miss the point. I am actually shocked. I am not shocked, however, that there are people who get offended. Getting offended is so 202x.
drunx 7mo ago
Just read this - following a similar direction: https://yuraa.com/2026/03/21/customer-service-as-a-product/ https://yuraa.com/2026/03/21/customer-service-as-a-product/
piker 7mo ago
The thing about dogfooding is that you have to force it in many domains, and if you aren't careful it can push you towards solving issues your users don't actually have. We've found ourselves trying to find this balance on Tritium. It's a word processor for lawyers, so has a specific narrow domain that allows us to provide a differentiated experience from Word. But if we try to use it like Word, we end up wanting generalized features that don't fit that strategy. I wrote a little about what we've come up with here: https://tritium.legal/blog/eat https://tritium.legal/blog/eat. This is one of the compelling rationales for closed-source / commercial software in certain B2B SAAS domains. It seems like you just cannot adequately test the happy and sad paths from a QA perspective in FOSS unless it's (1) insanely successful or (2) a dev tool.
caaqil 7mo ago
The author should consider smelling his own perfume, given the state and design of the site where he delivers his musings and gives us the moral lecture on not making the lives of one's customers miserable (without a hint of irony).
- zahlman 7mo ago
  > given the state and design of the site Aside from the general policy on HN of not complaining about "tangential annoyances", I don't even see the issue.
  - caaqil 7mo ago
    > "tangential annoyances" It's relevant to the central argument of the article, so I don't consider it a tangent (assuming that one even cares about the so-called policy).
Frannky 7mo ago
I know a person. Ex-Googly. Doing his startup. Spent one year on a crazy complex product. Investors do not get it. Users do not get it. He spends 99% of the time explaining why his ideas are so good. You ask to try the product, weeks pass and just slides and video demos. When you eventually try it, it's so confusing and nothing really works. I tried to make him understand that the constraint he needs to fit is users being able to understand rapidly why it's useful to them and that it should work. He does not care. He says it's about the story, and that the story will drive millions unlocking a super big team building his idea. I said that's cool but why in the meantime you don't just go with one thing that is useful and works and then procedurally evolve to your vision while you interact with the user and discover more about their problems. The answer was a one-hour speech on Google leveling system. Maybe he is right. Time will tell.
gurachek 7mo ago
[dead]
ks2048 7mo ago
In hindsight, it is obvious, but I couldn't make out what that synthesized voice was trying to say... She spells-out "approximately".
interludead 7mo ago
[dead]
smithcoin 7mo ago
I just assume a lot of product managers have never used their products anymore, and it shows across the industry. Have you ever tried to play Xbox live after not being signed in for a long time? Have you ever tried to use smart search terms in the Amazon search box? Have you ever tried to use these tv channel apps on a Roku? Do Fridgeaire reps own their own appliances? I’m just convinced people don’t use their own products where the people that use them and care are so few and far in between things are only getting enshrined.
krackers 7mo ago
>I recorded the call [^For training and monitoring purposes, of course] Heh I just realized that the "may be recorded" bit could also be interpreted as them giving _you_ permission to record the call
robeym 7mo ago
This resonates. We run a medical device manufacturing operation. We used an ERP for years that claimed to specialize in our industry. In practice it was a bloated system designed by people who'd never worked on a manufacturing floor. Bank reconciliation felt like threading a needle in the dark. Simple tasks required five nested menus. So we built our own. Went live on it a few months ago. The bugs we catch now are ones we catch because we're running real production on it every day. There's no substitute for being the one who has to suffer through your own software.

368 points by ColinWright 7mo ago

LocalH 7mo ago

But my own farts smell good

dekken_ 7mo ago
of course they do, until you're sick and then, you know something's off...
johnisgood 7mo ago
Yes. Talking about it is taboo, but it is quite a common phenomenon when people like the smell of their own farts and bodily odors.
- MathMonkeyMan 7mo ago
  As my high school friend said "Everybody likes their own brand." Consider the alternative.

bryanrasmussen 7mo ago

currently on the front page the post directly beneath this one was 25 years of eggs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224 a happy coincidence.

mpalmer 7mo ago

Dogfooding was a virtuous cycle for user and service provider alike, because incentives were aligned. Then growth - excuse me, metastasis - came along. Thanks to metastasis - excuse me, enshittification - we've outgrown dogfooding. We'd used it as a kind of UX gyroscope, something that works to keep us balanced without too much institutional thought or effort. It made us more efficient at competing. Now that the biggest firms are the least threatened by competition, why would they subject themselves to the indignities of the User?

chromacity 7mo ago

I agree with the broader point, but I'm perplexed that the author is talking about dogfooding as a "sacred practice in the tech industry" in the context of customer support. Among big tech companies, customer support usually isn't seen a part of the product. If you work at Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, you don't try to go through the non-existent consumer support channels to resolve issues with your account.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
schiffern 7mo ago
Exactly. That's the "smelling your own farts" part.
Kwantuum 7mo ago
Interestingly, in the company I currently work for, if an employee encounters a problem with the product, the expected way to report the issue is to open a ticket. Not in an different system with different people responsible for handling it, in the same ticketing system that customers use.

cainxinth 7mo ago

I’m the kind of person that just assumes customer service is going to be bad. I gird myself whenever I have to call a company and just deal with their gauntlet with patience, knowing the trick is to outlast them. It costs them money every time you call. I’ll often tell them I know that and assure them I will continue calling until the matter is resolved. It’s not fun, it’s just the way things sadly are. My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”

jmbwell 7mo ago
I get it. I also know customer service is a pretty low paying job for something that involves being yelled at all day I get as frustrated as anyone, but it’s not the fault of the person whose job it is to take my call. I remember once on the phone with Comcast I just explained the situation and jokingly said look, if it helps, feel free to tell ‘em I’m yelling and screaming. The guy laughed. An engineer called me an hour later with a firmware update for my modem. Sometimes there’s no winning. But sometimes it helps if you can put people on your team
- sgarland 7mo ago
  Yep. When I’m frustrated on the phone with a rep, I always make sure to say something like “I understand this isn’t your fault, but I’m very frustrated with X.” It seems to ease the tension a bit, anyway.
- carlosjobim 7mo ago
  Angry customers aren't at fault. If all customers are mad as hell when they call, then the company will have to start paying better wages to keep customer support staff from quitting, and they'd rather fix the problem before doing that.
justonceokay 7mo ago
The new feature of the iPhone where you can put a phone tree on hold until a person answers is very nice. I had a kerfuffle with Delta airlines along with a few thousand other people some days ago. I had to hold for 2.5 hours, but I spent it catching up with my dad and then my phone rang when the CSA was ready for me. I was so fresh and bright on the call I got an upgrade pretty much just for not being a bitch.

emerongi 7mo ago

My farts always smell good to me.

forinti 7mo ago
My dad used to joke that "[Citroen] 2CVs and farts, only the owner enjoys".
- emerongi 7mo ago
  Exactly. I like my own farts and I don't mind that everyone else thinks it stinks. I find the title not very well thought through, because smelling your own farts is unlikely to lead to change.

bix6 7mo ago

Yeah well economies of scale matters more than your sanity

mrweasel 7mo ago

Two stupid calls I've had: 1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that. 2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online. The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people. Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.

consp 7mo ago
The worst one I've had is that after waiting for about 10 minutes, it passed through to a person who pushed me through the another department, only to end up in the same preselect menu I started the call with but with another option selected which points me to a website where you must enter your question and get an email back with the request to call the service desk and select the option I took in the first place. The circle of help desk life. Kafka would be proud. This is likely due to them merging two help desks into one making the second part useless as they can no longer see the data they need and thus canceling it entirely since it didn't get the right metrics. Also turns out that calling the competitors help desk is more useful as they can actually see the thing I was interested in as it is shared between them (fiber connections work schedule when they start to dig, hint they weren't going to). Can't use the competitor since the connections are monopolies...

treetalker 7mo ago

Case in point, may every book the author picks up be designed like his website.

edent 7mo ago
Did you, by any chance, hit the "Drunk UI" option on a previous visit? If so, click one of the other themes at the top.

afarah1 7mo ago

Ah, so the minutes long wait hearing answering machine bs is a universal experience. I thought it was a local thing and limited to ISPs, utilities, and financials... When I can choose between competing companies, having a direct line to a human for customer support is at the top of my list. I'm happy with either chat or phone, I just don't want to go through a bot first.

MitchSaid 7mo ago

Some years back I was introduced to UK service consultancy Vanguard (and their "Vanguard Method"), essentially a systems thinking approach to improving service (not to be confused with the enormous US investment management company). In their world, "smelling your own farts" (ie. listening to and, more importantly, understanding what matters to your customers using normative learning methods) isn't primarily about empathy, it's about getting knowledge so you can understand how to intervene in your company as a system. Put that way, it's not a waste for decision-makers to listen to customer phonecalls, it's in fact the only way for them to gain the knowledge they need to understand what to do to improve their service (assuming that's their goal).

Aurornis 7mo ago

> There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer. One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires. In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.

xingped 7mo ago
Amusing you picked that quote to quote because your job description is a dead ringer for Amazon work culture.
- pengaru 7mo ago
  I suspect it's a dead ringer for Corporate America at any large American company.
  - xingped 7mo ago
    Mostly yes, I was just pointing out the irony of quoting Bezos as if Amazon isn't exactly the same problem (if not one of the worst of them all).
Twirrim 7mo ago
About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison. They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch. I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".

ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago

There was a famous Brown and Williamson phone message, from late last century: https://nypost.com/1999/09/23/smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-when-you-call-bw/ https://nypost.com/1999/09/23/smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-when-y... I actually have a recording of it (scratchy), but won't link it, because it's probably not worth it. It was a riot.

Quarrelsome 7mo ago
> “The idea came from the women who answer the phones,” said Brown and Williamson spokesman Mark Smith. Very cool that they did something that wild by trusting the judgement of their call centre employees.

GuestFAUniverse 7mo ago

It's the same horse manure, when architectonauts and developers aren't responsible for the operation of their Goldberg-inventions. Another phrase that comes to mind is: no skin in the game. To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 7mo ago
Maybe "moral hazard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

blfr 7mo ago

With a mass product we're all at the mercy of the bottom quantile or even vigintile. These are the people who need to hear about checking website, collecting basic information, etc. Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service. Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc. There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.

chanux 7mo ago

Whenever I have to call an IVR system for support it puts me in a blood rage 98 out of 100 times. This space is the ultimate dark pattern mine field. My common interactions were with banks and telco companies. Absolute trash. I'm pretty sure some systems allowed remembering the DTMF menu and press it while the voice recording played. But the recent systems I called did not allow this. It was like they intentionally made people wait to suffer the torture. People call these systems as a last resort (At least I do). It should be illegal to make them so bad. Also, I used to work with Telco side guys of these systems and they were very proud of these "capabilities". Sorry for the rant. I had to vent it out.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

joemazerino 7mo ago

The age old problem. Customer service isn't supposed to be mind numbingly unfathomable, and responding to customers should be easy. Unfortunately, unless higher management engages (is that Bezos or Gates? I've heard both) things will get lost in the mix.

skeeter2020 7mo ago

In my last role (engineering side) the VP of Product objected to me using the phrase "eating your own dogfood" because it was "gross" and she always interjected and replaced it with "drink your own champagne". I countered (privately) that was a feature; it's supposed to be a little unappetizing because you're early, building empathy and getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!). I think the difference in perspective succinctly illustrates the schism between trying to understand the customer experience asap, and the data-driven, kpi crowd where - conveniently - you can't discover these issues until it's too late.

strix_varius 7mo ago
I've heard exactly the same response before and I shared your reaction. The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
- thevinter 7mo ago
  Yes but isn't it a bit weird to be implying your customers are dogs?
  - voidfunc 7mo ago
    Our customers are morons for using our products and dogs are personable but pretty stupid so yea, makes a lot of sense.
    - nandomrumber 7mo ago
      [flagged]
  - Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
    Metaphor confuses, literally.
  - Quarrelsome 7mo ago

shevy-java 7mo ago

Customer service has different meanings. Personally I prefer good, simple and effective documentation. I hate having to use a phone to explain problems. It's ok to do it in person, but not my preferred way. > It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey. I kind of prefer companies that build products that never ever need anything. Not even warranty calls, because the thing just keeps on working. What I noticed in the last few years was that we are too dependent on google search. Now that it sucks, finding high quality information has become harder - and AI trend is further ruining this, as everyone just has the AI summarize stuff now, which does not always work either.

Telaneo 7mo ago
> Customer service has different meanings. Personally I prefer good, simple and effective documentation. I hate having to use a phone to explain problems. It's ok to do it in person, but not my preferred way. Same. If things have gotten to the point where I need to talk to a human (either or phone or mail) to be made whole, the product has already failed and I should look for alternatives the next time I need whatever it may be.

daneel_w 7mo ago

To me, "dogfooding" isn't using your own product out of loyalty or some nondescript principle, as the author suggests. It's specifically about using your own product during its development as a means of testing while it's in its worst phase - literally eating dog food for a while.

herodotus 7mo ago

And lying: "Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed". Only once did I get what everyone should use instead: "Please listen carefully to be sure you make the right selection". (Lying is also normalized by "I have read and agree to ....". Maybe better would be: "By clicking this box, you are agreeing to our needlessly lengthy terms, whether or not you have read them."

arkensaw 7mo ago

best HN headline of 2026

sauercrowd 7mo ago

This describes quite well the huge advantage small companies have vs big companies. (Motivated) people at small companies "care", and what I mean with that is they are responsible and can see a large enough portion of the customer experience that - if something is broken - they'll see the pain and try to address it. At a big company no one cares. They of course care about their job, but their job is such a small fraction of the overall customer experience, that seeing their work having an impact on their customer is exceptionally difficult. That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.

throwaway416430 7mo ago
I manage post sales support at a small company where this theme is present, however, I'm concerned that things may be slipping in the wrong direction. I need help dealing with this situation. Our software engineering team is burdened with tech debt and aggressive product roadmap. Understandably, they often feel the need to push back and keep things under control. Our customers and the employees who are accountable to our customers literally lose sleep when things aren't going well. Our engineering team feels complacent to function on a 9-5 schedule and sleep on critical issues for weeks. The only thing the engineering team appears motivated to actually own is the next iteration of the escalation process that somehow makes them even less accountable. Invariably the next iteration includes adding more details to Jira tickets that nobody will read. Basically no one on that team is dogfooding the product. Broken features are being shipped and they are expecting us to actually sell and support this.
- sauercrowd 7mo ago
  Here's what I'd suggest 1. There needs to be reframing of the engineer role in the team, by the leadership. It's not just to build things, but to help the customer. The job of the engineer is to build a good product for the customer, not just to "build", fix Jiras, ... 2. At the same time, get some engineers on customer calls. It doesnt need to be everyone, but you need to shorten the feedback cycle that engineers directly get signal from their users. A lot of information gets lost through Jira's, intermediates, ... They dont have need talk, just listen. Will they pay attention? That comes back to the reframing of their job being to create a good product for users. If everyone understands that's the goal, they will. If you have engineers building custom extensions for your database, because your CRM product needs some low level performance optimizations - it'll still be good but less interesting. The goal is to get some engineers talking to customers, cause they'll talk to other engineers. And engineers know how to talk to engineers. It'll shorten the feedback cycle, and that's good for both speed + signal. Now I don't know how much of that you already do, and they might even do all these things already, and what you see is the output of the worst issues already taken care of. If the latter is the case, there's some more cross team comms needed

schiffern 7mo ago

"Eat your own dog-food and smell your own farts" is just crass enough that people will actually remember and retell it. Nice work by the author's Comparative Memetics Division. "Eat your own dog food" == experience your own product. "Smell your own farts" == experience your entire product, including things that are typically unmentionables like customer service and billing

derriz 7mo ago
The phrase is striking but doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Companies make dogfood and sell it and expect others (dogs, who aren't known for verbalizing dissatisfaction with their food) to consume it. The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is. But I can't imaging a business which involves collecting farts and selling them to others and where sniffing a small quantity of each bottled fart would help improve production processes to ensure a better experience for the customer. And most people are appalled at the smell of others' farts but can tolerate their own, so the "smell your own" test wouldn't really tell you anything.
- whamlastxmas 7mo ago
  I think the metaphor is less about what you sell and more about the bullshit your customers have to endure to use the product you provide
- schiffern 7mo ago
  >The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is. Bingo. This is why "eat your own dog food" works so well. The best koans and parables include a contradiction, which is a teaching tool not a logic bug. You may think you don't need to eat your own dog food (just like the dog food companies), but actually you should still do it.
  - johnisgood 7mo ago
    I am surprised there are so many people on HN that completely miss the point. I am actually shocked. I am not shocked, however, that there are people who get offended. Getting offended is so 202x.

drunx 7mo ago

Just read this - following a similar direction: https://yuraa.com/2026/03/21/customer-service-as-a-product/ https://yuraa.com/2026/03/21/customer-service-as-a-product/

piker 7mo ago

The thing about dogfooding is that you have to force it in many domains, and if you aren't careful it can push you towards solving issues your users don't actually have. We've found ourselves trying to find this balance on Tritium. It's a word processor for lawyers, so has a specific narrow domain that allows us to provide a differentiated experience from Word. But if we try to use it like Word, we end up wanting generalized features that don't fit that strategy. I wrote a little about what we've come up with here: https://tritium.legal/blog/eat https://tritium.legal/blog/eat. This is one of the compelling rationales for closed-source / commercial software in certain B2B SAAS domains. It seems like you just cannot adequately test the happy and sad paths from a QA perspective in FOSS unless it's (1) insanely successful or (2) a dev tool.

caaqil 7mo ago

The author should consider smelling his own perfume, given the state and design of the site where he delivers his musings and gives us the moral lecture on not making the lives of one's customers miserable (without a hint of irony).

zahlman 7mo ago
> given the state and design of the site Aside from the general policy on HN of not complaining about "tangential annoyances", I don't even see the issue.
- caaqil 7mo ago
  > "tangential annoyances" It's relevant to the central argument of the article, so I don't consider it a tangent (assuming that one even cares about the so-called policy).

Frannky 7mo ago

I know a person. Ex-Googly. Doing his startup. Spent one year on a crazy complex product. Investors do not get it. Users do not get it. He spends 99% of the time explaining why his ideas are so good. You ask to try the product, weeks pass and just slides and video demos. When you eventually try it, it's so confusing and nothing really works. I tried to make him understand that the constraint he needs to fit is users being able to understand rapidly why it's useful to them and that it should work. He does not care. He says it's about the story, and that the story will drive millions unlocking a super big team building his idea. I said that's cool but why in the meantime you don't just go with one thing that is useful and works and then procedurally evolve to your vision while you interact with the user and discover more about their problems. The answer was a one-hour speech on Google leveling system. Maybe he is right. Time will tell.

gurachek 7mo ago

[dead]

ks2048 7mo ago

In hindsight, it is obvious, but I couldn't make out what that synthesized voice was trying to say... She spells-out "approximately".

interludead 7mo ago

[dead]

smithcoin 7mo ago

I just assume a lot of product managers have never used their products anymore, and it shows across the industry. Have you ever tried to play Xbox live after not being signed in for a long time? Have you ever tried to use smart search terms in the Amazon search box? Have you ever tried to use these tv channel apps on a Roku? Do Fridgeaire reps own their own appliances? I’m just convinced people don’t use their own products where the people that use them and care are so few and far in between things are only getting enshrined.

krackers 7mo ago

>I recorded the call [^For training and monitoring purposes, of course] Heh I just realized that the "may be recorded" bit could also be interpreted as them giving _you_ permission to record the call

robeym 7mo ago

This resonates. We run a medical device manufacturing operation. We used an ERP for years that claimed to specialize in our industry. In practice it was a bloated system designed by people who'd never worked on a manufacturing floor. Bank reconciliation felt like threading a needle in the dark. Simple tasks required five nested menus. So we built our own. Went live on it a few months ago. The bugs we catch now are ones we catch because we're running real production on it every day. There's no substitute for being the one who has to suffer through your own software.