Eat Your Own Dog Food
"Eat your own dog food" is an idiom describing the act of a company using its own products for day-to-day operations. It suggests that the company considers its own "food" the best on the market.
Software companies spend billions of dollars on market research and usability studies. They hire Human Experience Architects; experts who are sometimes required to have a PhD in psychology and 5+ years experience designing user interfaces. Yet, the majority of them don't even use their own product internally. Wouldn't using your own application give you a better appreciation for its intricacies than reading a 50-page report submitted by your Human Experience Architect? And Wouldn't it be more economical?
I’ll always remember the instance when a Product Manager who had been championing a desktop application for over a year admitted that he couldn't even launch it. This so-called expert was responsible for analyzing the end users’ requirements, prioritizing them, and writing a Software Release Specification, yet he had never even made use of the application himself! This explains why customers involved in Beta trials deemed the application’s latest and greatest features to be unusable.
Software companies should be the first to adopt their own technologies. If you're not willing to utilize your own application for day-to-date use, don't expect others to do so.
Certainly, there are exceptions to the above statement. Some companies are simply not representative of their target markets. In that case, their personal experiences and internal feedback is useless, and can even be detrimental. This is what marketing experts refer to as a Self-Reference Criterion (SRC); "an unconscious reference to one’s own cultural values, experiences, and knowledge as a basis for decisions"(1).
Generally speaking however, companies would benefit from using their own product internally. Not only would they have a better understanding of the end users’ experience, but the product’s quality would significantly improve. Imagine going through your defect tracking system and coming across a usability bug opened by your customer. This bug would only require 2 hours of maintenance work, but since your designers are on a tight schedule, you might be tempted to gate this defect as far as possible. Now imagine if this bug affected you or your CEO in your day-to-day activities. Do you think that defect would remain open for another 6 months?
Another problem related to not using your product to accomplish day-to-day tasks is the demoware effect. Chances are your sales team and/or product managers demonstrate your applications on a regular basis. In order to improve their demos, they might be tempted to raise change requests. First-class demos certainly have some benefits, but when your scarce resources are busy implementing demoware, they're not necessarily concentrating on value-added features that would improve the everyday experience of end users. Demoware is transient. At some point in time, it either becomes software or vaporware. Which one do you want your development team to focus on?
"Eating your own dog food" doesn't just mean you should use your product. It also means you should attempt to install it and configure it yourself, read the customer documentation, attend the training sessions intended for external customers and contact your 1-800 support line when you come across a problem. Keep in mind that your customers are not only buying an application. They're buying a whole product, which includes these augmented services and deliverables.
Keeping a customer is 10-20 times more economical than signing a new one. Make sure you understand and answer their needs, and their loyalty will pay off.
Listen to my advice. Eat your own dog food. Your product will improve significantly faster than if you ate your competitors.
(1) Cateora, Philip R. (1996), International Marketing – 9th Edition, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
This article was originally published on www.gantthead.com.