Eating Your Own Dog Food: Why It Matters (And How to Actually Do It)
If you’re selling something, you should be using it. Sounds obvious, right? Yet plenty of businesses skip it.
“Dogfooding” (yes, that’s the term) means putting your own product to work inside your company. Not to posture. To prove it holds up under real pressure. Here’s why it matters, and how to do it without turning the whole thing into a token side project.
Why Bother?
Quality control, straight from the source
Using your own tools makes you feel the rough edges. You catch the bugs, the friction, the “why is this so clunky” moments before customers do. Fix them. Ship better.
It gives the team a reason to care
When leadership runs the same software and the same awkward beta everyone else is wrangling, it lands. Morale goes up. The work feels real, not theoretical.
Real use equals real marketing
Forget glossy promises. Want proof your product works? Use it. Document it. Show it solving actual problems. That kind of marketing lands.
How Do You Start?
Build a cross-functional team that actually uses the product
Not just devs. Bring in product managers, support, and a few brave folks from sales. Different roles see different messes. That’s where the insights live.
Decide what “success” looks like
Are you stress-testing infrastructure? Hunting UX snags? Collecting internal feedback? Pick your goals and stick to them. This isn’t for vanity metrics.
Make it part of daily life
Dogfooding isn’t a one-off. Bake it into the workflow. Use the product. Break it. Complain. Iterate. Repeat.
Dogfooding in Web Design and Development
At Subtle Difference, we use what we build. Before anything gets near a client, we run it internally. That keeps us sharp in a world where tech changes about as often as browsers nag you to update.
We even built our own CMS, RealOnline. Not in a vacuum. In the wild. It’s been thrashed by sites with millions of visits a year and by niche ones with only a few thousand. It had to be flexible, fast, and practical. So we made it that way by using it every day.
The Bottom Line
If you’re not using your own product, why should anyone else? Dogfooding can be messy, inconvenient, and a little humbling. It’s also one of the quickest ways to improve what you’re building and how you build it.
Eat up.