Though the slogan might sound a bit odd, I’d like to claim it as a concept crucial to our success as a product-driven organization: adopting what’s known as the “eat your own dogfood” philosophy. This principle emphasizes the importance of internal product usage by our own team members.
Let’s have a closer look into the specific benefits of internal product utilization:
- Enhanced Defect Detection: Direct engagement with our products facilitates the identification of technical anomalies or usability roadblocks firsthand. This allows us to address these issues proactively, ensuring a more polished experience for our external customers.
- Empathy Cultivation: Utilizing our products fosters an empathetic understanding of the user experience. We gain a firsthand perspective on customer needs and challenges, empowering us to prioritize features and make informed decisions about product direction.
- Quality Assurance Elevation: Internal product usage cultivates a vested interest in quality. When we rely on the functionality and user-friendliness of the products we build, it inspires a commitment to excellence in development and delivery.
- Improved Collaboration: “Eating our own dogfood” isn’t confined to development teams. Cross-departmental product usage fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing. Insights from sales, marketing, and customer support teams can illuminate critical product enhancements.
Essentially, this practice fosters a continuous feedback loop. We build, we use, we learn, and we refine. By actively engaging with our own products, we ensure we’re not just building functionality, but crafting impactful solutions that delight our customers.
Let’s all embrace the “eat your own dogfood” philosophy and contribute to the creation of best-in-class products. This will not only elevate our offerings but also solidify our position as a leader in the market.
Albrecht Günther 