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

Faced with the pain of having to use the Ancestry tool for work communication, the team gained a greater understanding of the problems with it, as well as a better idea of how to solve them. Dogfooding forces you to experience a product as your users do—not just in a theoretical or roadmap sense, but in a real, practical, everyday sense. When you use your product yourself, you'll find blind spots that you never noticed before and gain insight into how to address them.

A common pitfall that we fall into when we get really close to our product is forgetting what it's like to be a new user. This makes it easier to overlook issues that might be obvious to an outsider. Sometimes we get so deep into our experiences that we forget what it’s like to start using our products for the first time. We forget that not everyone has the same knowledge and understanding that we do.

One thing I encourage you to do is to sign up for your service again, using a brand new account. Do this every few months to stay up-to-date on the experience, and to remind yourself that there's always more to learn and improve. What are the pitfalls and challenges that people run into? Does the product feel easy or hard? What makes the product sticky?

Having customer empathy means putting yourself in the shoes of another and experiencing the product from their point of view. It’s about looking outside yourself and seeing through their eyes, without the debugging tools and the access to engineers. We're building products for people who may not have computers, or phones worth a thousand dollars apiece, and if we forget that, we risk leaving them out of the equation.

Sometimes we think the whole world is made up of people just like us. In reality, it’s quite different. Our perspectives are often limited by the places we live, the technology we use, and the issues we run into in our day-to-day lives. Dogfooding can give us a different viewpoint, enabling us to see how our products affect people who are different from us.

Does anyone care about your new product? (Doing market research with Google’s Keyword Tool) at andrewchen

A question every entrepreneur asks is, if I build it will they come? Tapping into a large market with pre-existing demand makes things easier. Going after markets where users are already familiar with your product category, the different options, and you build a product that is better against some competitive axis. Some of the Valley’s best companies, like Google, Facebook, and Apple’s mobile products, entered their respective markets late in the game and effectively competed with differentiated products to win. For ideas in spaces with lots of competition, if you are able to get to scale and differentiate along some key dimensions, ultimately your traction lets you do all sorts of fun innovative stuff later on. It’s easier to reinvent something than to invent it.

One of the key tools that you can use here is the Google Keyword Tool. My favorite use cases are to validate how mainstream a product category is, make sure you are using customer-centric wording to describe your product, and to identify nearby product positioning options. If you plug in keywords related to your business and find very low numbers, it might mean you’re using wording that mainstream users don’t understand or don’t care about. Steer your product towards a category with millions of pre-existing consumer searches – this shows mainstream understanding and demand for your product category.

If people are searching for products in your category, then you are in an existing market. One of the best uses of the GKT is for finding the right words to describe your product. If you plug in your high-concept pitch and you get millions of searches back, then you’re in good shape. If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse. Build a car, not a faster horse, yet start by describing it as a faster/better horse until people understand what cars are. Afterwards, build on that term.

Sometimes, you find millions of users searching for something that doesn’t exist - that’s pretty awesome, and a great opportunity if you can execute a really compelling product there. Have a vision for your product and execute against that. Invent and build cars, but market it as a horseless carriage so that people know what they’re buying and why. It’s still important to try this out when your entrepreneurial intuition says it’s the right way to go - but remember that you might have to go through a step of cleaning up the marketing and messaging around your product to slot it into something consumers understand.

Combining the two ideas, we can see the importance of both dogfooding and market research in building successful products. Dogfooding allows us to experience our products from the perspective of our users, helping us identify blind spots and areas for improvement. It reminds us to think about the needs of different users and not get too caught up in our own experiences. On the other hand, market research, using tools like the Google Keyword Tool, helps us understand the demand and mainstream understanding of our product category. It allows us to position our product effectively and use customer-centric language to describe it.

Incorporating unique insights, we can see that both dogfooding and market research require a global mindset. It's important to remember that our experiences and perspectives are limited to our own contexts. By putting ourselves in the shoes of different users and understanding the broader market, we can build products that cater to a diverse audience and have a better chance of success.

Before concluding, here are three actionable advice based on these insights:

1. Regularly engage in dogfooding by signing up for your own service using a new account. This will help you stay updated on the user experience and identify any issues or blind spots that may have emerged.

2. Utilize tools like the Google Keyword Tool to validate the mainstream understanding and demand for your product category. Adjust your product positioning and messaging accordingly to align with customer-centric language.

3. Take a global mindset when conducting market research and product development. Consider the needs and perspectives of users from different backgrounds and contexts to ensure your product caters to a diverse audience.

In conclusion, by combining the practices of dogfooding and market research, we can gain a comprehensive understanding of our products and their impact on users. It allows us to identify areas for improvement, position our products effectively, and cater to a diverse audience. By continuously putting ourselves in the shoes of our users and staying aware of the broader market, we can build successful and impactful products.