What Is Dogfooding?

‘Dogfooding’ or ‘eating your own dog food’ refers to the practice of an organization or company using their products or services internally. This process can help producers test their commodity in a real-life scenario. And like this, ensure that it productively solves the problem that the product or service is addressing.

This can allow you to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and further solve any issues pertaining to your product’s overall functionality. Furthermore, dogfooding is extremely useful in practically proving your product’s organizational value.

Benefits of dogfooding

1) Reduced development costs

Software bugs found after product release can be extremely expensive to fix, with adjustments being up to 5 times more costly to fix than if it was detected during the software design and development phase. The most common use of dogfooding is to detect internal bugs and errors within a software’s design that could easily be detected and adjusted before being released to the general public.

Instead of employing customer support teams to acknowledge and address consumer complaints, product improvements can be made internally, which can help save both development cost and time.

2) Increased product knowledge

Before selling products to consumers, marketing teams and sales representatives will usually have to undergo an extensive training process to understand the particular product or service.

However, dogfooding allows your organization’s employees to teach themselves about the product design and features by employing a hands-on approach. This will allow your employees to assist consumers better and help your business reduce product training requirements.

3) Employee feedback

85% of small and medium-sized businesses stated that online feedback helped them improve their overall operations. Therefore, by testing your business’s products and services internally and collecting employee feedback through surveys and forums, you can gather valuable data and draw insights that can be used to improve your product’s design or features.

This will give your employees a chance to collaborate with each other, which can foster improved productivity and help your business skip time-consuming customer testing trials to gain product feedback.

4) Improved product quality

By first testing out your product or service in a real-life workplace environment, you can discover defects or faults with your product. These would be harder to detect in the design and development phases. Collecting opinions and feedback from the actual users of your product will help you improve its usability, scalability and overall quality.

Planet Crust: our dogfooding process

At Planet Crust, we perform dogfooding to ensure that we can deliver the best possible product to our consumers. Corteza, built and maintaided by Planet Crust, is the perfect automation tool to help assist your business processes. Get started for free to try one of our flexible software solutions.