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What is dogfooding?
Dogfooding — short for “eating your own dog food” — is the practice of a company using its own product in production for its own work, before or instead of relying on external alternatives. The phrase is widely traced to Microsoft in the 1980s. Modern usage spans every product company that runs its own software internally to find issues before customers do.
Why dogfood
- Fastest feedback loop: engineers see bugs in their own workflow within minutes, not waiting for support tickets.
- Empathy with users: the team feels the friction users feel.
- Quality signal: a product the team will not use itself is a credibility problem.
- Recruiting and retention: employees prefer to work on products they actively use.
Where it works best
- Internal-tool overlap: developer tools, productivity software, communication platforms — products the team would otherwise buy.
- SaaS infrastructure: hosting, observability, security, data tools — naturally consumed by the engineering team.
- B2B SaaS where the team is the user: CRM for sales-team-targeted products, marketing automation for marketing tools.
Where it fails
- Products targeting users with different workflows than the team (e.g., physician-facing software built by an engineering team).
- Products serving emerging-market customers when the team is based in developed markets.
- Vertical SaaS for specific industries the team has never worked in.
In these cases, dogfooding is a poor substitute for customer research and design-partner programmes.
Dogfooding vs. related practices
- Dogfooding vs. beta testing: beta is external; dogfooding is internal.
- Dogfooding vs. design partner: design partners are early external customers; dogfooders are the building team themselves.
Do: dogfood relentlessly for products where the team is a representative user; ship daily and run incident response on the team’s own workflow.
Don’t: rely on dogfooding alone for products targeting users whose context differs from the team — supplement with customer research.