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.