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 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 …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.