Interesting. For me it feels that dogfooding is actually sometimes an excuse for not talking to users. It's easy and available. Perhaps we should decide on the % of people we want to have using our product that are not internal, and aim to satisfy that %.
It definitely is an excuse used to not talk to users. You basically always want a much higher % of external people using your feature (unless it is an internal one). Dogfooding is much more of a situational tool I feel.
"Too much dogfooding can cause you to think you are building what users want, but really only build what you want"
This is pretty much what's happening over Twitter. Elon was a power user who figured he could make the Twitter experience better for him if he bought the platform. But his experience is very different from the majority of users' so it ended up degrading the experience for everyone else.
I think for many companies the biggest challenge is when your product is not easily used by developers. For example, I’m in the AgTech industry, and to properly use my product I need to have a farm 😅
Interesting. For me it feels that dogfooding is actually sometimes an excuse for not talking to users. It's easy and available. Perhaps we should decide on the % of people we want to have using our product that are not internal, and aim to satisfy that %.
It definitely is an excuse used to not talk to users. You basically always want a much higher % of external people using your feature (unless it is an internal one). Dogfooding is much more of a situational tool I feel.
"Too much dogfooding can cause you to think you are building what users want, but really only build what you want"
This is pretty much what's happening over Twitter. Elon was a power user who figured he could make the Twitter experience better for him if he bought the platform. But his experience is very different from the majority of users' so it ended up degrading the experience for everyone else.
Great article. Will Larson wrote one on the topic recently, I highly recommend it: https://lethain.com/domain-expertise/
I think for many companies the biggest challenge is when your product is not easily used by developers. For example, I’m in the AgTech industry, and to properly use my product I need to have a farm 😅
Yup, definitely a challenge for people working in very different industries. I always appreciate the stories of teams trying really hard to do it.