You’re Eating Your Own Dog Food Wrong

Alex Pedicini
UX Collective
Published in
2 min readJan 12, 2018

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Dogfooding is the practice of using your own product or service. As a product manager, I’ve often advocated for regular and dogfooding of our products as it is one of the best means to build knowledge of the product and empathy for users.

One thing I’ve taken issue with is how many companies approach dogfooding. Using your product or service in your office, at your desk, on fast wifi connections is unlikely to be an accurate representation of how real users will experience your product in the real world.

If the goal is to build knowledge and empathy then we should be striving to simulate the most real-world environment users will experience your product. The environment could include different device types, internet connections, locations, surrounding people, weather, or any other factors or distractions that a real user might face.

My first experiences with dogfooding were when I joined the team at Ubersense (now part of Hudl). Ubersense was a mobile app used by sports coaches and athletes to record and analyze their movement on video. We had set up an indoor golf net to regularly test (aka wack golf balls), but this was not how the vast majority of our users experienced the product.

We needed to get out to driving ranges and experience the struggle of trying to self-record a video, view videos on the phone through sun glare, experience battery drain while recording dozens of videos on the range, and try sharing videos while switching between wifi and 3g connections to really experience the product (and the pains) that our users were seeing and feeling.

I would strongly encourage all product teams to get creative and invest the necessary time to get out of the office and regular work environments and use your product like a real user does.

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