4 ms·
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
by 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 agoI'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 agoYes but isn't it a bit weird to be implying your customers are dogs?
- voidfunc 7mo agoOur 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 agoMetaphor confuses, literally.
- Quarrelsome 7mo agoI think in the analogy that we're the dogs.
- grosswait 7mo agoNo. The idea is until it receives the chef’s kiss, it’s dog food.
- xp84 7mo agoIdk some people love dogs a lot. Maybe more than people!
- nandomrumber 7mo agoThe average person generally seems less than neutral to see me. Many people aren’t just openly hostile, they make a point to immediately let you know they aren’t here to help, they’re here to make everyone’s life less pleasant. With people, there are many scenarios where if you’re out of line, disagree, that’s it. You’re done. They’ll never ever consider you worth any reasonable sort of treatment. Dogs, by comparison, are angels.
- carefulfungi 7mo agoInteresting. I prefer "champagne" as it clarifies the goal: to make something curated, crafted, and desired. I've never interpreted the dogfood v. champagne difference as anti-empathy somehow.
- mcmcmc 7mo ago> the goal: to make something curated, crafted, and desired. None of these are the goal. The goal is to deliver value. The saying just means to sample your own product, with the implication being that you should be doing some form of quality management. It could just as easily be “play with your own widgets”. Bougie-fying it to champagne destroys much of the meaning because it literally doesn’t matter what the product is, you should be sampling it no matter how distasteful or irrelevant to your personal interests. You would not have a hard time getting people to sample champagne for their job.
- Jeff_Brown 7mo agoDogfoodung usefully connotes getting off your high horse, getting dirty, getting your face in it. I think it's perfect.
- justonceokay 7mo agoI was trying to articulate to myself why calling it champagne feels like self-deception. And the reason is that to a SE all software is broken, buggy, slow, incomplete, has the wrong feature set, and is not extensible. To us software gets shipped when it stops giving us cold sweats. For a PM to assume that the product ever becomes champagne feels very naive.
- carefulfungi 7mo agoChampagne also explodes if you shake it too much :-).
- bloppe 7mo agoI think it's sort of the opposite. You're saying that your dog food is of such high quality that even the CEO will eat a can of it. You're saying you hold your product in high esteem, not that you have low self esteem.
- reverence23 7mo ago> "eating your own dogfood" because it was "gross Interesting perspective. I watch a YouTube channel of a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog, and even feeds his dog from the skillet where he cooked the meal. Many practical reasons for that but also the dog being the main tool in hunting and getting that food in the first place.
- manarth 7mo ago> "a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog" "Dogfood" is used to differentiate from "food", "steak", "meat", etc. The youtube channel you describe is showing a dog being fed stereotypical cooked "human" food, rather than a human eating "dog" food.
- reverence23 7mo agoThank you for clarifying, English is not my native language. In the end I guess different dogs get different quality food.
- Ylpertnodi 7mo agoThere was a BBC early-morning breakfast tv slot in which a dog was presented as 'vegetarian', until test time...the dog (given free choice between two bowls of food placed on the studio floor) went immmediiately for the meat dish.
- speff 7mo agoFrom my understanding, it's generally for health purposes (though the convenience doesn't hurt). An example my vet provided is that the level of sodium consumption needed by humans is way too high for dogs.
- manarth 7mo agoThere's an economic benefit: in the UK (and many other countries), ingredients which are not "fit for human consumption" (and might otherwise be thrown away) can be processed into pet food. Much commercial dog-food is made with ingredients which aren't fit to be consumed by humans.
- weedhopper 7mo agoInteresting, I wouldn’t think it matters that much though. If the phrase eating dogfood is unappetising to some when why not use the champagne analogy.
- Quarrelsome 7mo agobecause you lose the meaning over time. Emotional aspects of language can be useful. George Carlin's famous piece on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
- nocman 7mo agoYeah, I've never really been at all offended by the "eating your own dogfood" phrase, because I always saw that as being the point also. I must admit, however, that the title of this article was too crass for me. I came very close to not reading it at all just because of the title. In my opinion, the article would be better served by something else, but I'm just not a big fan of bathroom humor in general.
- ferngodfather 7mo agoSo you always hold your nose?
- thaumasiotes 7mo ago[dead]
- geoffschmidt 7mo agoI think the origin is in the phrase, "Will the dogs eat the dog food?" which was common VC-speak in the 90's and 00's, referencing dog food commercials that once ran on TV, and meaning something like "this has been made to sound great in an internal powerpoint presentation, but will customers actually like it?" Attributed to a Microsoft exec in the 80s: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/eat-your-own-dog-food-how-microsoft-popularized-one-of-the-yuckiest-terms-in-tech-history/ https://www.geekwire.com/2025/eat-your-own-dog-food-how-micr... In 2015, Marc Andreessen memorably said of Mixpanel's success at product-led growth: "The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-adva... That then led to the idea of "eating your own dog food", because if even you won't eat it, what credibility do you have saying that the other dogs will?
- saltcured 7mo agoI can't even remember when I first heard this expression in CS. It feels like it was already an idiom when I was in university in the early 90s. It also felt like it was tapping into a general cultural background I already had growing up in California. It did not require any explanation. Without being able to cite a specific TV ad or other urban legend sort of baseline, it clearly communicated that you hold yourself and your products to a higher standard. As a dog-food producer, you don't just meet the minimum requirements for legal sales, but you make it well enough to be fit for human consumption too. It's in the same category as someone demonstrating that they could safely drink or breathe byproducts of some other industrial process. And, ironically, there was also a widely understood corollary that we could expect PR types to do something like this while secretly fearing that it would actually harm them.
- miltonlost 7mo agoHow do you get to be a VP while simultaneously being that delicate? My god, eating dogfood as gross is so childish to object to.
- kid64 7mo agoIn the OP's country, dog food may be considered less desirable than people food.
- mrguyorama 7mo agoThat's the entire point! If you aren't willing to eat your own "dog food" because it's "less good", then you are making shitty dog food! The entire point is that you should strive to be a company that makes dog food so good that you would be happy to eat it as not-a-dog because it's above and beyond the bar! If you are unwilling to use your own product, fix that
- yolo3000 7mo agoWhat do you mean? Champagne is classy, it matches perfectly the role of VP. These are special, unique people. They will take your unrefined words and use their magic to make it stand out.
- omoikane 7mo ago> drink your own champagne This is a great substitution, and more accurate since humans and dogs have different preferences in food, so humans eating real dogfood is often avoided in practice. But it's harder to to turn "drink your own champagne" into a gerund like "dogfooding".
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pinkmuffinere 7mo agoI always assumed that “eat your own dog food” was a polite-ization of “eat your own dog shit”, lol
- dataflow 7mo ago> getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!) Didn't you just destroy your own argument? If dog food is expected to be more delicious to dogs than humans, how is eating it supposed to indicate anything about whether it's well-made for the dog? Shouldn't you have your dog eat it, rather than yourself? So isn't your manager's alternative the one that actually makes sense?
- interludead 7mo agoYour "feature, not a bug" take is exactly right... the slight unpleasantness is what creates empathy
- ben_w 7mo agoIt may amuse, or disturb, to report that a previous boss had an unfortunate mis-translation of the idiom as "eating our own dogshit".
- _doctor_love 7mo agoReading this story and related comments, I'm struck folks have lost the history around dogfooding. From what I understand the term really picked up from Paul Maritz. The saying was - "if you're not eating your own dogfood, you're smoking your own dope." Very basic idea: is your product good enough that you would use it / consume it for your own needs and purposes? No? Then you are deluding yourself if you think you have a good product. Simple as that.
- blitzar 7mo ago> "drink your own champagne" You just let her know that the colloquial meaning of that phrase is to drink ones own urine.
- make3 7mo agojust "eat the food you cooked" would be fine. drink your own champagne sounds like such corporate group think bullshit I'd be tempted to change workplace on the spot
- poszlem 7mo agoWhat's gross is that kind of language policing.