Run a thought experiment with us: Think of some of your favorite software products that you use regularly.
Maybe it’s Figma. Airtable. Notion. Bubble.
Would your opinion of those products change if you found out that the company's teams didn’t use their products internally?
We certainly think so. If Notion used Google Docs for their company's Wiki instead of Notion, that'd be a bit suspicious. If Figma employees didn’t even use Figma for their own design needs, their marketing would feel unconvincing.
Enter: dogfooding.
What is Dogfooding?
“Dogfooding” refers to the practice of using your own company’s product internally, and it’s commonly used in the software and technology industries.
Surprisingly, though, the term didn’t originate in tech. Instead, it originated with, well … dog food.
In the late 1970’s, popular television commercials for Alpo dog food featured spokesperson Lorne Greene claiming that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. In time, the phrase “eating your own dogfood” became a metaphor for using the products you were promoting.
The jump to the technology world came soon after, when then-President of Apple Michael Scott sent a memo banning typewriters in their offices in favor of their newest product, the “Apple II-Apple Writer Systems.”
Microsoft was similarly aggressive in using its own products, and since then, the idea of dogfooding has become associated with technology development.
But enough history lessons — let’s take a look at what dogfooding looks like today, why it matters, and how to integrate it into your own product testing and development processes.
How can a company use dogfooding to its advantage?
Creating strong marketing is just one benefit of dogfooding. Done well, dogfooding as a practice can help a company significantly improve its product — if it’s not done superficially. This is not the same as Coca-Cola banning Pepsi products in the office, or a clothing store requiring its employees to only wear its brand.
Instead, teams who dogfood effectively increase internal usage of their product to speed up beta testing and generate significant internal feedback on the product. This allows you to iterate faster and more effectively, and quickly make your product better.
It’s not always practical for every company to use its own product, but there are plenty of areas where dogfooding can still create meaningful advantages, especially within tech. Here are two real-life situations of dogfooding that you can steal or take inspiration from for dogfooding your company’s products.
1. Dogfooding your own website
For many tech companies, dogfooding your own website is a great place to start. We do this here at Bubble: Everything on our website but the editor is built on Bubble. This puts our internal team of Bubble Developers in the perfect position to test, iterate, and request new features.Early in Bubble’s development, we knew that we wanted to give people the freedom and ability to build multi-page web apps and match the design quality of more limited but “landing page”-centric website builders like Wix or Squarespace. Building our own web app on our platform acted as a “forcing function” to make sure we had all the features and functionality available to make our website competitive with other platforms.
Bubble’s website is one of the larger and more complex apps we’ve created at Bubble using our own platform. By building it on Bubble, we can iterate faster on new features and pages, as well as empower our own developers to build our site without writing code.
A perfect example of this is the Ideaboard, a page on Bubble’s main website where users can submit, upvote, and discuss ideas for product improvements. VP of Product (and one of the original creators of the Ideaboard) Allen Yang says the concept isn’t unique to Bubble, but the team built it themselves because “it’s a perfect use case for Bubble!” In fact, the first version came together in just a few days. This was a huge plus, says Allen, because it shows “how much Bubble helps you develop ideas very quickly.” The initial capabilities were fairly basic: users could submit and upvote ideas and Bubble team members could moderate submissions.