Product Dogfooding: Maximizing Software Quality and UX

It’s not just the features that separate good from great software. Users are more interested in exceptional experiences. Dogfooding is an excellent method to achieve that. It’s where companies stop relying on outsiders and turn their teams into first users.

Let’s understand how this insider trick can transform product failures into successes and enhance a software’s potential.

Product Dogfooding: Maximizing Software Quality and User Experience

What Is Dogfooding?

Dogfooding refers to the practice of a company using its internally developed software products during development and after release.

This first-hand customer experience provides valuable insights into product functionality, usability, and potential issues.

The term ‘dogfooding’ comes from a 1976 commercial for Alpo dog food, where actor Lorne Greene claimed he fed the product to his own dog. In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent an email titled ‘Eating our own Dogfood’ to Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager. In the email, Paul challenged the latter to increase internal usage of the product.

Therefore, the term suggests using your own products to ensure their quality before offering them to others.

Let’s take a look at some real-life dogfooding program examples.

Dogfooding: Real-World Examples

Global giants like Amazon and Microsoft are leading proponents of testing your own dog food. Amazon famously dogfoods many internal tools, including its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This allows them to identify and address scalability and performance concerns in their internal software before external customers encounter them.

Similarly, Microsoft tests its own products first, such as Microsoft 365, across its entire organization. This ensures the suite integrates with internal workflows without problems and identifies user experience issues from the real user’s or an employee’s perspective.

Dogfooding plays a crucial role throughout the software release lifecycle:

During development, it helps identify bugs and usability problems before they reach external users
Post-release, it allows companies to monitor real-world usage patterns and gather valuable product feedback from internal users who share similar target demographics as external customers

To sum up, dogfooding means consistently using a product you built to determine what works and what needs improvement. It offers several benefits to companies.

Benefits of Dogfooding in Software Product Development

Here are the most prominent advantages of dogfooding in software product development:

Finding the root cause of a problem: Internal users, familiar with the product development process, can often pinpoint the root cause of issues more efficiently than external testers. This saves valuable time and resources during the debugging process
Improving product quality by discovering bugs, issues, or errors: Dogfooding helps uncover many issues, from minor bugs to major usability roadblocks. By addressing these concerns early, you can ensure a more polished and user-friendly product reaches the market

Using your products internally leads to better quality control and happier users. Your employees act as real-world testers.

They encounter the same issues and frustrations as external users, allowing you to identify and fix problems before they impact customers.

Further, eating your own dog food opens the door for immediate feedback. Employees can easily report bugs, suggest improvements, and share their experiences directly with the development team. This leads to faster iteration and a more user-centric product.

By “drinking their own champagne,” developers and product teams gain a deeper understanding of the user experience. This fosters a sense of ownership and a commitment to building a product that solves problems.

Pro tip: Use product management templates to organize the development, marketing, and user experience!

Process of Dogfooding in Development

You can implement dogfooding in various ways throughout the development process. Here’s how:

Step 1: Identify internal testers

A crucial first step is to select a group of employees from different departments to participate in dogfooding. This can include software developers, product managers, sales representatives, and customer support personnel.

The goal is to gather diverse perspectives from a beta test within the company and ensure the product caters to a wide range of user needs.

Step 2: Define testing stages

Integrate dogfooding into various stages of the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle). This can involve using prototypes for initial usability testing, employing internal builds for bug detection, and conducting pilot programs with real users in specific departments to assess the product’s functionality in real-world scenarios.

Encourage internal usage in different departments within your company to identify use cases that may not have been considered initially.

Step 3: Gather feedback

Establish clear channels for internal testers to provide feedback. This can involve online surveys, internal forums, or dedicated feedback sessions. Feedback mechanisms should be user-friendly and encourage testers to share their experiences openly and honestly.

Step 4: Analyze and act

Once feedback is collected, it needs to be meticulously analyzed. Identify recurring themes and prioritize bug fixes and improvements based on the severity of the issues and their potential impact on the user experience.

Once you accomplish these steps, it’s important to implement dogfooding in your business processes effectively.

Implementing Dogfooding in Your Business

Building a strong company culture that encourages testing your company’s product is essential for reaping its benefits. Here are some tips for successful implementation:

Leadership buy-in: Secure the support of your company’s leadership team. Their endorsement will encourage employee participation, increase internal usage, and ensure dogfooding is seen as a valuable practice, not just an additional burden
Incentivise participation: Consider offering incentives to encourage employees to participate actively in dogfooding. This could involve gamification elements, recognition programs, or even small rewards for detailed and insightful feedback
Training and resources: Equip your employees with the necessary training and resources to participate in dogfooding effectively. This can involve workshops on how to provide constructive feedback and access to internal beta testing tools

Ways to improve internal product testing

Enhancing internal product testing is crucial for effective dogfooding. Consider using project management tools like ClickUp to streamline the process.

ClickUp Form View helps you create user-friendly forms to gather internal user feedback on your own products. This feedback can then be connected or converted to trackable tasks and assigned to team members for further investigation, tracking, and resolution.

ClickUp Forms are versatile and not limited to feedback gathering. Here’s how you can make the most of this feature:

Simplify bug reporting: Create a form with specific fields for testers to report bugs, ensuring all crucial information (description, steps to reproduce, screenshots) is captured in a consistent format. This eliminates ambiguity and allows for faster troubleshooting. The form can also prevent testers from reporting the same bug multiple times
Streamline workflow: Set up the feedback form template to automatically send bug reports and feedback to designated team members (developers and testers) within ClickUp. This ensures issues are addressed promptly by the right people. Centralizing all testing feedback within ClickUp fosters better communication and collaboration between testers and developers, as everyone can access and discuss the reported issues in one place

Additional ClickUp features for enhanced dogfooding

ClickUp Issue Tracker Template

Report, track, and prioritize bugs, errors, and other software development issues with ClickUp’s Issue Tracker Template

Use the ClickUp Issue Tracker Template to create a single source of truth for all bugs and issues found during dogfooding. This eliminates confusion and ensures all issues are tracked and addressed on time.

The template also allows teams to prioritize bugs based on severity and impact, ensuring critical issues are fixed first. It helps maintain a defined workflow for reporting, investigating, and resolving bugs, leading to faster resolution times.

Download This Template

ClickUp Product Feedback Survey Template

Analyze user responses and use the results to inform decisions in your SDLC with ClickUp’s Product Feedback Survey Template

You can also use the ClickUp Product Feedback Survey Template to maintain a consistent format for gathering feedback from internal testers, ensuring valuable data is captured in a structured way.

This ready-to-use product testing template helps analyze feedback and identify areas for improvement, guiding future product development based on dogfooding experiences.

The template also provides a way to measure user satisfaction and track progress over time, making the value of dogfooding more tangible.

Download This Template

ClickUp Product Management software

The ClickUp Product Management software helps you visualize your entire company’s product development roadmap, allowing testers to understand the context behind features you’re dogfooding.

The platform clearly defines product requirements, ensuring dogfooding tests the intended functionality. You can also create user stories that reflect real-world usage scenarios, leading to more comprehensive dogfooding tests.

Pro tip: Use the best business process mapping tools to execute smooth workflows during dogfooding tests!

ClickUp's all-in-one product management platform — Map your product vision, align your team, and sprint to market with ClickUp’s all-in-one product management platform

There’s more! Use ClickUp’s Software Team Project Management platform to get a clear view of the overall dogfooding project, allowing teams to plan agile testing phases, assign resources, and track progress effectively.

The platform helps identify and manage dependencies between dogfooded features, ensuring a smooth testing process and avoiding roadblocks.

It also:

Enables tracking changes made during the dogfooding process, making it easier to roll them back if necessary and identify the root cause of issues
Optimizes the allocation of development and testing resources for dogfooding activities, ensuring efficient use of team time
Provides tools to generate reports on dogfooding results, helping teams measure the effectiveness of testing and identify areas for improvement in future iterations

The Role of Dogfooding in ClickUp Development

“We absolutely use ClickUp to build ClickUp. We believe in dogfooding just as much as any other company. One of the things that we love about dogfooding is that we can really understand what our customers are feeling day to day. So, if ClickUp is slower than normal, we know that it’s slower than normal. If we find a missing feature, we know that it’s a missing feature for a reason.”

Brian Shen, Head of Product at ClickUp

Internal project management

ClickUp’s internal teams rely on the ClickUp platform for task management, collaboration, and communication. This real-world usage helps identify areas for improvement and ensures the platform caters to the needs of its own users.

Steve Gough, VP of Acquisition at ClickUp, agrees.

“One of the things that’s been most remarkable about working for ClickUp is the level of dogfooding that goes on here. I didn’t really understand how powerful and transformative the product could be until I witnessed how literally all major projects live in or flow through the platform. The ‘aha’ for me came in my first week when it became very apparent that internal emails simply are not a thing. Not only were they not a thing, but it was poor form to use them. That was just the tip of the iceberg though.”

Steve Gough, VP of Acquisition at ClickUp

Kuba Jaranowski, Director of Software Engineering at ClickUp, echoes his thoughts.

“I also really love the way we are working in the sense of “dogfooding”—or using our own product every day. Every team at ClickUp uses our product to collaborate, manage projects, and get their work done. This is the holy grail for software teams and it rarely happens, so it’s amazing.”

Kuba Jaranowski, Director of Software Engineering at ClickUp

Enhancing ClickUp software features

Dogfooding allows the ClickUp team to test new features internally before releasing them to the public. This ensures the features are well-integrated, bug-free, and offer a seamless user experience.

“We solicit opinions and feedback from other teams inside of ClickUp, to understand what different functions might want to do their jobs better.”

Brian Shen, Head of Product at ClickUp

Cross-functional input is essential to discovering some of the most persistent user problems and solving them with innovative features.

Ace Product Testing with Dogfooding

Dogfooding is not just a trendy practice; it’s critical to delivering high-quality software products.

By allowing employees to become early adopters of their creations, companies can gain invaluable user insights, identify and address potential issues early on, and ultimately create software users love.

As the software industry continues to evolve, dogfooding is likely to play an increasingly significant role in ensuring the success of new products and features.

ClickUp can be your one-stop shop for streamlining internal product testing and software dogfooding by consolidating your testing efforts into one platform.

Build testing plans, assign tasks to testers, and track progress in real time. ClickUp gives your team a clear view of what’s being tested and by whom.

Easily log bugs in ClickUp with detailed descriptions, screenshots, and assignments. This practice promotes transparency and ensures bugs get fixed efficiently.

Similarly, ClickUp’s discussion boards are an excellent way to share ideas, collaborate, and centralize communication instantly.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What is an example of dogfooding?

An example of dogfooding would include a software developer team using the pre-release version of their own productivity app internally to identify and fix bugs before it’s released to the public.

2. What is dogfooding in product management?

In product management, dogfooding refers to the practice of product managers and other internal stakeholders using a company’s own product throughout the development process. This helps them gain firsthand experience and identify areas for improvement before the product is launched to external users.

3. Why is it called dog food testing?

The term ‘own dog food testing’ is believed to have originated when Microsoft developers used MS-DOS on their personal computers, practically ‘eating their own dog food’ by testing the product they were creating. This lighthearted analogy became a widely recognized term for testing tools internally and encouraging this behavior before a new feature release or software launch.