Eat Your Own Cooking

“If we won’t use it ourselves, why would anyone else?”

The Pros

Empathy through friction — You experience the same pain points as your users. That broken onboarding flow or slow query isn’t an abstract bug report; it’s something that interrupts your workflow.

Faster feedback loops — Issues surface before they hit production users. You catch things QA might miss because you’re using the product in real contexts, not scripted test scenarios.

Alignment — When the team uses what they build, priorities become clearer. Features that seem important in planning meetings reveal their true value (or lack thereof) in daily use.

Credibility — Users trust you more when they know you’re eating your own cooking.

The Cons (or at least the caveats)

Blindspot risk — You’re not your user. Power users and developers tolerate rough edges, memorize workarounds, and skip documentation. You can end up optimizing for yourselves rather than the actual target audience.

Scale mismatch — A team of 10 dogfooding a product designed for 10,000 users won’t catch concurrency issues, edge cases at scale, or the chaos of diverse environments.

Opportunity cost — If dogfooding consumes significant time, it can slow development. There’s a balance between “using the product” and “shipping the product.”

My Hot Take

Dogfooding is invaluable, especially for a company that really needs the product to aid in their fluid and flexible operation.

After a full career trying to get Agile methodologies to work, I’ve found that they tend to overcomplicate the development process, taking valuable time away from development and business operations. When I came across Shape Up (by the folks at Basecamp) it immediately resonated with me.

So I created Merrily, a business operation framework based on the Shape Up development process. In dogfooding it, I’m really getting to understand both the usefulness of the dogfooding process and the viability of Merrily as a new, personal-feeling kind of business platform.

As I develop Merrily, I keep getting ideas for other helpful products, and often end up designing and implementing those as well. Be careful to limit how deep you allow yourself down seemingly helpful rabbit holes. Use your best judgement, and always be sure to come back to some sort of yardstick on your overall progress so you don’t miss any opportunity costs!