In software development, dogfooding refers to the practice of developers using the very software they are building, often in its under-development state. The idea is to catch bugs early, improve usability, and encourage developers to care more about product quality.
This approach works best for products that developers themselves can actively use, like IDEs, email clients, or internal tools. However, it may not suit user-facing apps with different end-user profiles (e.g., social media platforms).
While dogfooding can reveal flaws and drive quality, it also has potential downsides, like productivity loss or bias toward developer-friendly interfaces.
Anyone here practicing software dogfooding on their team? What have been your wins or challenges with it?
From our experience, we dogfood pretty aggressively on my team. Our product is a developer analytics dashboard, so we’re basically the target users.
It’s been incredibly useful for catching rough edges early. One big win: we realized our onboarding flow was way too confusing, because even we couldn’t get through it without reading the docs.
Fixing that upfront saved a ton of support time later. But yeah, the risk is real, we sometimes overlook how non-dev users might struggle with stuff that feels obvious to us.
In my last company, we built an internal workflow automation tool and required every team to use it, including ourselves. Dogfooding helped us uncover performance issues and usability pain points quickly.
What I found interesting is how it pushed us to prioritize things we might have otherwise ignored, like keyboard shortcuts and dark mode. But a downside?
Sometimes we over-optimized for our own needs and missed feedback from less tech-savvy users until it was too late.
We’ve used dogfooding in a lightweight way, mostly with preview builds of our mobile app. It helped build empathy within the dev team because they felt the real friction users would face.
One big challenge, though, was making sure dogfooding didn’t delay our work, we had to balance using the product with actually building it. So we ended up assigning specific “dogfood days” every sprint, and that gave us useful insights without burning productivity.