3 things I learnt while dogfooding.
Dogs are known as man’s best friend and as such usually fed by their parents or other close family members. Depending on the type of food, there is a possibility that you get to taste some of their food Hence the term dogfooding. However, in this situation I didn’t eat my dog’s food. I actually don’t have a dog. What I did however is a dog food test of the Product that I manage, and it was quite an eye opener.
So, what is dogfooding or dog food testing? This is tech industry shorthand for the use of one’s own products. More specifically, it is when a company uses its own products to identify and resolve bugs. Like customer testing, dogfooding provides a much-needed opportunity to iterate on meaningful, real-world product feedback.
The dog food testing is an absolute imperative. Every product manager should test their products both new and mature products as you will walk a mile in your customer’s shoes and ultimately improve their experience of your product.
While performing this test, I learnt a few things along the way:
1. Treat the test with the same level of seriousness you would a customer implementation. Assign the same resources, follow the same process, and take no shortcuts. This will allow you get a good feel of your customer experience. Your platform might be fine but there might be blind spots in your process (onboarding for instance). I suggest you engage an external consultant or professional company for the test. If you do not have a budget for this, partner with a team that was not involved in the design and build of your product.
2. Do not view the dog food test as an audit of your platform or even your performance as a Product manager. When conducting this test, you will get a lot of feedback — Oh I promise you will. Most important thing is to recognize that the essence of the test is to find these items and resolve them.
3. Prioritize the remediation of the open items found in the dog food test. I know this sounds cliché but there is usually a temptation to include these items in your feature backlog and go back to business-as-usual. Fixing them immediately brings significant benefit and ultimately ensures that you will be ready for customer implementations.
I hope this proves useful to other Product Managers looking to Launch their products.
