Don’t just preach, practice it too: A guide to dogfooding

What Is Dogfooding? 

Dogfooding means using your own product within internal teams before releasing it to customers. The name comes from the old saying "eating your own dog food" - if it's not good enough for you, why should customers want it? 

Corporate giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have integrated this practice into their core operations. Google employees use Gmail, Docs, and Android internally. Amazon runs on AWS. This isn't just about finding bugs - it's about understanding what it's really like to live with your product every day.

Within internal teams, you can find you first sample space of users, your very own User Acceptance testing, if you will. The benefit? You catch problems early. Internal users discover issues that formal testing misses. They find the weird edge cases, the workflows that don't quite work, and the features that seemed good on paper but are cumbersome to use. 

The direct impact is apparent; you build better products and features. When your sales team struggles with your CRM or your designers can't stand your design tool, you get honest feedback and suggestions for improvement. The bureaucratic red tape of customer politeness often hinders honest input from reaching the relevant teams- using your own products cuts the process short.

Your team cares more. There's something powerful about depending on your own creation. 

Start small, scale thoughtfully: Begin with your development team, then expand to other departments. Each group brings different perspectives and use cases. 

Make feedback easy: Create simple ways for people to report issues without bureaucracy. A Slack channel, a quick form, or integration with your existing tools works better than formal processes. 

Support your internal users: Treat them like real customers. Provide documentation, respond to their issues, and take their feedback seriously. 

Embrace diverse perspectives: Include non-technical team members. The person from HR using your project management tool might spot usability issues that engineers miss entirely.

Dogfooding isn't perfect. Your team might be more tolerant of bugs or have different needs than real customers. Engineers might work around problems that would frustrate regular users. But these limitations don't diminish its value - they just mean dogfooding should complement, not replace, other testing methods. 

Take our approach at KAI Nest. We don't just talk about dogfooding – we embrace it within our teams along with standard testing procedures. Our development teams rely on Lexium BRF to build validation frameworks for actual client deliverables, stress testing the system with over 3,500 validations per data point on real-world projects. 

The impact is measurable: using Lexium suite has slashed our internal development cycles by 90%, freeing up time for more rigorous testing within those compressed timelines. Meanwhile, our product managers and HR team depend on Auxilio for day-to day operations - managing employee records, processing leave requests, and handling payroll calculations, enabling our teams to be more productive and thoughtful in creating features for our users. 

If you're not dogfooding yet, start tomorrow. Pick one team and one feature. Set up a feedback channel. Use your product for real work, not just demos. 

The companies building the products we love most are the ones brave enough to depend on them first. Your customers deserve nothing less than a product you'd choose to use yourself, every single day.