Dogfooding—aka dog fooding—is the practice of using your own product for the same purpose and in the same way as your end-users would. Although the term only started to appear around the 1980s, dogfooding has rapidly risen to best practice status. Its adoption and the praise it receives from small teams and tech giants like Google and Amazon prove that it is more than a buzzword.
Finding external testers that are responsive and deliver quality feedback is an industry-wide challenge that dogfooding attempts to work around. It also minimizes your team's separation from your users and their experience with your app.
Dogfooding turns your team into users of your app. As a result of walking a mile in your user's shoes and using your app in real-life scenarios, your team will better understand your users and ship a stronger product.
Now let's dive into the benefits, risks, and examples of dogfooding, as well as some tips for getting the most out of company-wide testing.
Benefits of Dogfooding
The main benefits of dogfooding are reducing reliance on external testers, maintaining confidentiality during pre-release testing, and building genuine empathy between your team and your users. Beyond the standard gains of any testing program, such as catching bugs, crashes, and usability issues, dogfooding creates unique advantages that external beta tests can't replicate.
Dogfooding Reduces the Need for External Testers
If you face challenges finding reliable external testers, dogfooding might be a good fit. Your employees are often as tech-savvy as your end users and sometimes even more so. This means they can deliver higher-quality feedback faster:
- Technical precision: Internal testers provide the exact reproduction steps and device info developers need to fix issues quickly.
- Actionable feature feedback: Product teams get informed opinions on existing functionality and missing capabilities from people who understand the business context.
Dogfooding Is Confidential
When your company has confidentiality concerns, dogfooding can be an ideal solution. If security and privacy is a high priority for you, then your team members probably sign NDAs when they join your company. This means you can roll out beta versions of your app to your entire company for testing without the need for additional legal documents as in an external beta test.
Dogfooding Puts Makers in Users' Shoes
When your team uses the product daily, the user's pain becomes their pain. This turns abstract feedback into personal experience and creates genuine advocates for the user across your organization.
- Better prioritization: Teams can judge which issues have the biggest real-world impact and which features matter most.
- Increased ownership: Familiarity with the app builds a stronger sense of responsibility for its quality.
- Cross-functional benefits: Support, sales, and marketing teams develop deeper product knowledge that improves their conversations with customers.
Risks and Limitations of Dogfooding
Dogfooding is not a silver bullet and comes with inherent risks that must be acknowledged and mitigated to ensure the program delivers valuable results.
Risk of Misaligned Target Audience
Your internal team's needs and pain points may not align with those of your actual end-users. Focusing too heavily on internal feedback risks building a product that works perfectly for your team but is ill-suited for your customer base. It's crucial to supplement dogfooding with external user feedback.
Bias and Increased Familiarity
Team members, especially those close to development, are naturally biased and highly familiar with the product. This can lead to them developing "blind spots" and overlooking issues new users would immediately encounter, such as poor onboarding or confusing navigation. Mitigate this by involving new hires and less-involved teams, and periodically having veteran dogfooders go through the sign-up process again.
Over-reliance on Dogfooding
Dogfooding is primarily about building user empathy and is not a replacement for formal quality assurance (QA) or beta testing. The goal is not just to find bugs (a secondary benefit), but to experience the app like a user would. Over-relying on it as a testing tool can lead to missing critical issues.
Overlooking "Once-in-a-Lifetime" Scenarios
Critical user experiences, such as the initial sign-up or onboarding process, are often overlooked because veteran internal testers rarely repeat them. These events have a huge impact on adoption and should be periodically revisited within your dogfooding program.
When to Skip Dogfooding
In certain cases, dogfooding can be counterproductive and should be avoided:
Highly Specialized Software
If the app is designed for a niche, specialized profession (e.g., a medical diagnosis tool) that your internal team does not practice, using the product for an adapted or irrelevant purpose will waste time and provide misleading feedback. In these cases, rely on targeted external testing with actual specialists.
Immature Product (MVP Stage)
An app in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage often lacks features necessary for a real-world use case, making it more of an obstacle than a tool for your employees. Dogfooding at this stage can negatively impact internal productivity and provide skewed feedback about functionality that will be addressed in later releases.
Tips for Dogfooding
To get the most out of your dogfooding program, treat it like you would a traditional beta test. The fact that the test is within your company doesn't mean it will automatically have high adoption and exemplary testers. Here are the best practices and tips to maximize your results.
The More Participants the Merrier!
Involve as many participants as possible. Large companies often have several thousand internal testers in their dogfooding programs. A bigger, more diverse pool compensates for the fact that your employees may not perfectly represent your actual user base. Scale also enables quantitative analysis and helps you distinguish issues on common user paths from those on edge-case flows.
Segment Your Audience
Your marketing team will use the app differently than your developers, focusing on different features and value propositions. Segment your internal testers and categorize feedback by role or department. This approach helps you spot usage pattern differences across teams and may reveal use cases you hadn't considered.
Don't Lose Fresh Perspectives
As your dogfooding program matures, testers become too familiar with the app and lose fresh perspectives. Counter this by periodically having dogfooders reset and go through sign-up and onboarding again. New team members are especially valuable as they'll spot issues that veteran testers have become blind to.
Simulate Your Pricing and Plans
If your product has several pricing plans or packages, make sure you don't have all your dogfooders on the unlimited plan. Have them on a combination of plans with ratios that reflect your real users. This will help you uncover issues with the limits you have on your plans that you would otherwise miss.
Facilitate the Feedback Process
Keep in mind that your dogfooders are trying to use your app for a real-life need, which can even be part of their daily jobs. Make sure that your feedback process is as frictionless as possible to avoid affecting their productivity, and maximize the feedback you receive. Allow testers to test on their own time and provide tools for in-app reporting, feedback, and surveys to simplify the process.
Incentivize Feedback
Forcing employees to dogfood rarely works as well as positive reinforcement. Offer modest incentives to encourage participation—but keep them minimal so the reward doesn't become the goal.
- Friendly competition: Set up a public leaderboard between teams with small prizes for top contributors.
- Token recognition: Trophies or shout-outs for consistent testers go a long way without creating perverse incentives.
Ensure C-Suite Participation
One of the best ways to encourage the internal adoption of your dogfooding program is to involve the C-suite as testers. Try to include them in the teams, the competitions, the rewards, and maybe even some mild public humiliation.
Announce Your Milestones and Events
Organize some events to mark milestones in your dogfooding program and celebrate them. You can hold company-wide lunches with each beta build and host a dinner party when the build goes to external beta, for instance. These periodic, light events serve as reminders of the status of the dogfooding program and help your team feel more involved.
Close the Feedback Loop
Keeping dogfooders engaged requires closing the feedback loop. Dedicate a two-way communication channel for the internal beta and monitor it actively.
- Respond to reports: Reply to feedback and update testers on issue status.
- Communicate roadmap decisions: Let testers know which requests are in development, postponed, or out of scope.
- Ship detailed release notes: Call out which bugs were fixed and features added in each build.
- Hold a wrap-up all-hands: Present data and results when the beta cycle ends so teams see the impact of their contributions.
Examples of Successful Dogfooding
Many leading technology companies successfully embed dogfooding into their product development culture to drive quality and innovation.
Microsoft
Microsoft, the company that coined the term "eating our own dogfood," has a sophisticated dogfooding process unified under the Microsoft Elite program. This optional, incentivized program centralizes dogfooding across all their products (including Xbox). It uses a system of points, badges, and leaderboards to encourage voluntary participation from a diverse, global sample of over 25,000 employees.
Google utilizes its large product portfolio for dogfooding, including experimenting with their enterprise teams using consumer apps to see what features would be needed for a business context. They demonstrate a mature program by knowing when to skip dogfooding altogether, such as with products whose target markets are too different from their employees, relying instead on extensive beta testing.
Early in their mobile shift, when the Android app was slow and buggy, Facebook proactively encouraged and incentivized their predominantly iPhone-using employees to switch to Android. They even blocked access to the desktop website internally to force employees to use the mobile versions of Facebook and truly experience the pain points of their users, leading to a dramatic increase in the app’s quality.
Lyft
Lyft's program focuses heavily on empathy rather than just bug discovery. All eligible employees, including C-suite executives, are required to spend at least four hours per quarter as a Lyft driver. This practice ensures that the team is intimately familiar with the driver-partner experience, keeping their users' needs and pain points at the center of their focus.
Power Your Dogfooding Programs with Agentic Mobile Observability
Dogfooding is the essential practice for building genuine user empathy within your team, but empathy alone cannot fix a critical bug at 3 AM. This is where Luciq, your agentic mobile observability tool closes the loop. Luciq turns the qualitative experience of your internal testers the pain points the frustrations the blind spots into precise actionable data. Stop guessing the root cause of the issue your employee testers found. Integrate Luciq into your dogfooding program to instantly visualize user journeys pinpoint performance bottlenecks and ship high quality fixes faster than ever before.
Ready to make your dogfooding program truly agentic? Try Luciq today.