If you’re looking to strengthen your feedback loops, build empathy across teams, and refine your product more quickly, dogfooding drives quality software development.
Don’t let the term “dogfooding” scare you – it doesn’t involve anyone eating dog food.
Instead, dogfooding is about using your product internally before shipping it out to your subscribers. Over the years, working with software teams and refining the agile process, I’ve seen firsthand how dogfooding transforms a product from “usable” to “unmissable.”
What is Dogfooding?
In the tech world, “dogfooding” means using the product you create, day in and day out, as if you were one of your customers. By “eating your own dog food,” you experience firsthand every benefit – and every frustration – that your customers might encounter.
It’s one thing to test a feature in an isolated environment; it’s another to rely on it daily to manage your employee data, collect feedback, or monitor performance. By implementing dogfooding, your team never loses touch with your customers or their experience.
The phrase “eat your own dog food” (popularized in tech) has several rumored origins, ranging from a 1970s Alpo commercial to a legendary internal Microsoft email titled “Eat Your Dogfood.” Regardless of who said it first, the message is the same: if you believe in what you are building, prove it by using it yourself.
The Benefits of Dogfooding
"While working with Cognito Forms, I kept trying to right-click to see a menu of options. That little annoyance turned into an idea I pitched at an innovation meeting. Right-click now works seamlessly in the app and is a function that many users count on."
Keith Sturkie
Azure Architect
Cognito Forms
Immediate, actionable feedback
Dogfooding allows you to recognize areas for improvement quickly. Using the product across multiple internal teams- from customer success to human resources to marketing, you gather diverse perspectives from a wide range of technical skills.
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Unique ideas
With those diverse perspectives, each team’s feedback helps shape new features or tweaks that might otherwise go undiscovered. -
Usability
If a process takes five clicks longer than it should, the team feels that pain, too. -
Performance
If load time or automation slows down, you notice it immediately, often before your customers do.
Our agile development cycle incorporates these observations early, ensuring the product is refined to match real-world needs. This tight feedback loop results in product updates that address issues before they ever become widespread customer concerns.
Building empathy and trust
Customer support Support teams are often the first point of contact for customers, particularly when they encounter a problem or issue. At Cognito Forms, members of our customer success team are experts at using our product. This occurs over time, through training, and with daily use of the product. They’re able to empathize deeply with customers and offer tailored solutions, rather than scripted responses.
By committing to dogfooding, you don’t merely test your product in a controlled environment – you integrate it into your daily processes. This fosters a deep empathy for your customers’ needs that cannot be replicated through any other method. After all, if something isn’t working for us, it won’t work for our customers. That authenticity resonates and helps build trust: people recognize your commitment to making your product as efficient and reliable as possible.
Driving an ownership mindset
Dogfooding encourages the ownership mentality. When every employee depends on the tool to do their job, everyone shares the responsibility of making it better. This creates a culture of collaboration and accountability. If a bug surfaces, we all have a stake in seeing it resolved quickly. When we release a new feature, our entire team is eager to try it out and refine it further.
User experience (UX) When the design team engages with the product daily, they don’t just rely on analytics or secondhand user anecdotes – they feel every pain point firsthand. When designers are personally frustrated, you can’t hold them back from devising innovative solutions. Seeing their designs working seamlessly drives excitement and fosters the confidence to refine and further elevate the experience.
"Real-world use sparks the kind of aha moments you can't replicate in a staged demo - suddenly, you realize how a minor tweak could vastly improve someone's experience."
Tyler Trotter
Lead Product Designer
Cognito Forms
Continual improvement
Agile iteration is most powerful when data informs every sprint. By dogfooding with each cadence release, your product evolves in step with genuine user experience – no guesswork needed.
The Risks of Dogfooding
While dogfooding provides significant advantages, there are potential pitfalls to consider:
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Targeting the wrong audience
If you’re not the target end user, dogfooding can produce skewed insights. Ensure that at least some testers are close to the product’s core audience, or you may develop features that no one needs. -
Skill level of users
A product made for novices may be tested by experts on your team, making it too advanced or leaving beginner-friendly features underexplored. Balance your internal testers by including those with varying skill levels and expertise. -
Limited scope
Using the product in a single environment won’t replicate the diversity of real customers. When possible, use your product with external contacts to spot edge cases you might otherwise miss.
How to Implement Dogfooding in Product Development
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Foster open communication for feedback
Dogfooding thrives on transparency. Encourage everyone to share insights – both big and small. An offhand remark like “Why does this button’s color feel confusing?” could signal a significant usability fix. -
Incorporate the product in daily processes across all teams
Make your tool an integral part of each department’s workflow, including HR, Marketing, Customer Support, Engineering, and other relevant areas. Daily use ensures everyone has hands-on experience and will uncover minor annoyances or bugs before the official release. This will also spark ideas for new features or improvements. -
Provide time to iterate and fix bugs
No one benefits from identifying problems if there’s no space in the sprint to fix these bugs. Bake “fix time” into your development cycle. An agile process that includes dogfooding fosters quick turnaround on critical issues uncovered by internal users.
HR and internal tools Human resource professionals use the product in ways that most of the company does not. They work with all teams across the company and with external potential hires. They can quickly spot inefficiencies in workflows or issues with data handling. When they get the same question every time, there’s a usability issue, and it can be communicated to the development team.
Take Your Product to the Next Level
Dogfooding isn’t magic – it doesn’t replace traditional QA or external beta testing. However, it is a powerful tool in your development toolkit, enabling your team to step into the customer’s shoes in a direct and tangible way.
As CEO, I’ve learned that the best time to identify bottlenecks, questionable design decisions, or hidden gems is before launch, when you’re still the user. If you’re looking to strengthen your feedback loops, build empathy across teams, and refine your product more quickly, dogfooding drives quality software development.
Dogfooding at Cognito Forms
Ultimately, using our product is a powerful strategy to ensure that our development team remains at the forefront of form-building technology. By leveraging Cognito Forms for everything from timesheets to PTO requests to marketing surveys, we continually uncover new ways to refine what we’ve built.
At Cognito Forms, a part of our company culture is that we are never satisfied with the established way of doing things. Dogfooding drives innovation, enabling us to continually deliver a product that not only meets but exceeds expectations, because we rely on it every day – just like you.
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Jamie Thomas
Jamie is co-founder of Cognito Forms, an online form builder for organizations seeking to quickly and easily connect with their customers. In his free time, Jamie loves spending time with his wonderful wife and kids, training for triathlons, camping with boy scouts, singing in the choir, and trying out the latest gadgets.