Dogfooding: How Putting Yourself in the User’s Shoes Changes the Way You See Your Product

Dogfooding: How Putting Yourself in the User’s Shoes Changes the Way You See Your Product

In today's competitive market, creating a successful product requires more than just technical expertise and market research. It requires a deep understanding of the users and their needs. This is where the concept of dogfooding comes into play. Dogfooding, or using your own product, allows you to experience it from the user's perspective and gain valuable insights that can help improve it.

When you use your product yourself, you'll find blind spots that you never noticed before and gain insight into how to address them. The team at Ancestry, for example, faced the pain of having to use their own tool for work communication. This experience gave them a greater understanding of the problems with it and helped them come up with effective solutions.

A common pitfall that many product teams fall into is forgetting what it's like to be a new user. When we get too close to our product, we tend to overlook issues that might be obvious to an outsider. This is why it's important to regularly sign up for your own service using a new account. By doing this every few months, you can stay up-to-date on the user experience and remind yourself that there's always more to learn and improve.

Having customer empathy is crucial for creating a successful product. It means putting yourself in the shoes of another person and experiencing the product from their point of view. This requires looking outside yourself and seeing through their eyes, without the debugging tools and access to engineers. It's about understanding the challenges and pitfalls that people run into, and making the product easy to use and sticky.

The global mindset is also an important aspect of dogfooding. Sometimes, we tend to think that the whole world is made up of people just like us. But in reality, our perspectives are often limited by our own experiences. By using our own product and gaining a different viewpoint, we can see how it affects people who are different from us. This helps us ensure that our products are inclusive and cater to a diverse user base.

Incorporating dogfooding into your product development process can lead to a knowledge-creating company. A knowledge-creating company is not just a machine, but a living organism with a collective sense of identity and purpose. It is an organization that consistently creates new knowledge, disseminates it throughout the company, and embodies it in new technologies and products.

The key to this process is personal commitment. When employees have a strong sense of identity with the company and its mission, they are more likely to contribute to the creation of new knowledge. Innovation begins with individuals who have insights and ideas that can lead to new patents, product concepts, or process innovations.