Key takeaways
🐾 Dogfooding means using your own product before release to experience it like real users and uncover issues early.
💡 Dogfooding helps spot usability flaws early, saving time, money, and embarrassment by catching problems before users do.
🏢 Top companies like Microsoft, Google, Slack, and Meta rely on dogfooding to test new features and ensure reliability before launch.
🧭 To start dogfooding, choose diverse testers, pick the right features, collect feedback with tools like UXtweak, and close the feedback loop.
🔍 Dogfooding, fishfooding, and beta testing happen in sequence. First comes internal testing, then limited external testing, and finally public testing.
You can read all the feedback forms in the world, but nothing compares to living through the product yourself. It’s like being both the chef and the food critic. When you do that, you get to taste your own recipe before serving it to the crowd.
This whole process is referred to as product dogfooding. Even the best companies like Google dogfood as if their lives depend on it.
So before your beta launch, before you send that “We’re live!” email, here’s a question worth asking: Have you dogfooded your product yet?
What is product dogfooding?
Dogfooding products simply means using your own product before releasing it to the public. It’s when your team becomes the first group of real users, testing everything from features and design to bugs and overall experience.
The term may sound funny, but the idea behind it is powerful. If you expect others to use your product, you should be confident using it yourself first.
Dogfooding often plays a huge role in building an MVP in UX design, where teams validate core ideas before investing in full development. This also helps you identify issues early and gain insight into the emotional journey of your users.
Origins of the term dogfooding
The dogfooding origin dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, though the exact starting point is debated.
This most popular story traces back to Alpo, a dog food brand whose spokesperson, Lorne Greene, famously claimed he fed his own dogs the same food he advertised.
That simple idea, using what you sell, quickly became a metaphor for product authenticity.
Then, in the late 1980s, Microsoft popularized the term when one of its managers sent an internal email titled “Eating your own dog food.”
The message encouraged employees to use Microsoft’s software products internally before releasing them to customers.
Over time, the term evolved beyond its funny roots. So, while the name might make people smile, the meaning behind it has become a serious pillar of how great products are made.
Benefits of eating your own dog food
Many teams wonder, how does dogfooding improve product quality? It’s simple because it uncovers flaws, tests workflows, and refines experiences long before launch.
With that said, let’s break down the key benefits that make dogfooding such a game-changer for product teams.
✅ Benefit 1: Spots usability issues before they reach users
One of the biggest perks of dogfooding is that it exposes usability flaws early on. When your own team uses the product in real life, small irritations or confusing features instantly surface, before the user ever finds the app.
Research from the Nielsen Norman Group shows that testing with just five users can uncover around 85% of usability problems.
This means your internal team, acting as everyday users, can identify most of the major pain points before the product even reaches beta.
In one discussion on r/ExperiencedDevs, developers shared that while dogfooding can sometimes feel inconvenient, it often exposes usability flaws faster than any testing tool.
✅ Benefit 2: Cuts down the cost of fixing mistakes
Every bug you catch early saves you money later. The longer a problem remains hidden in your product, the more costly it becomes to fix.
Studies also support this claim, finding that errors discovered after release can cost up to five times more to repair than those caught during testing.
It’s one of the reasons why companies now use dogfooding in tech and all other industries to reduce their risk exposure. Plus, since your team lives inside the product daily, they spot and fix issues when they’re still small and cheap to handle.
It saves development hours and protects your reputation, as nothing erodes user trust faster than a buggy launch.
✅ Benefit 3: Speeds up feedback and decision-making
One of the best benefits of dogfooding is that you don’t have to wait for a report or formal testing round, as it happens instantly.
This kind of quick internal feedback loop can significantly reduce your iteration cycle. Just remember, finding and fixing experience bugs before release is one of the most effective ways to improve product quality.
By dogfooding, you turn your entire team into an ongoing feedback machine, which makes improvements more consistent.
✅ Benefit 4: Builds real trust with customers
Do you know that only 34% of consumers trust the brands they buy from? That means you need to bring authenticity to the table, so consumers prefer to purchase products from you and trust your brand.
One way you can do it is by showing your team relies on the same tool you’re selling. It speaks louder than any marketing promise.
Using your product publicly tells customers, “We stand by this.” It boosts credibility and shows you’re building an ideal product-market fit.
As Simon Sinek once said,
The responsibility of a company is to serve the customer. The responsibility of leadership is to serve their people so that their people may better serve the customer. If leaders fail to serve their people first, both customer and company will suffer.
Examples of companies that practiced dogfooding
Before any big launch, almost the world’s smartest companies take their own products for a spin. These dogfooding examples show how internal testing helps polish software and shape product culture.
1. Microsoft
Microsoft built an entire internal culture around dogfooding and is considered its pioneer.
The term itself became famous because of Microsoft back in 1988, when executive Paul Maritz sent an email titled “Eating our own dog food” to encourage employees to use early versions of their own software.
Since then, Microsoft has gone all-in on this approach. Internally, they call it “Customer Zero”. This means Microsoft’s own teams are the first to run every product before the public gets access.
According to Microsoft’s Inside Track blog, the company’s digital division regularly runs global operations on beta versions to ensure real-world reliability. So, if tech giants are using dogfooding, why shouldn’t you?
2. Google
At Google, dogfooding is a part of daily life. Every major product, from Gmail to Android, undergoes months of internal testing before it’s released.
Google employees, also known as “Googlers,” are the first users of experimental builds, giving feedback that shapes the final experience.
Take Gmail, for example. Before its public release, Google employees used early versions for over a year to test functionality and speed.
The company also utilized Gmail Labs as a public extension of this process, which allowed both employees and users to test experimental features.
More recently, Google asked all employees to “dogfood Bard,” its AI chatbot, weeks before launch. In a company-wide memo, CEO Sundar Pichai urged teams to use the AI extensively to identify weak spots and improve its reasoning.
3. Slack
For Slack, dogfooding is less about finding bugs and more about feeling the product the same way users do.
From day one, the Slack team used its own platform for everything, ranging from project management to customer discussions.
Every message sent internally became a tiny usability test. Moreover, features like thread replies, emoji reactions, and reminders were all born out of internal frustrations that employees noticed while using Slack themselves.
Today, Slack runs private “dogfood channels” where engineers and designers report bugs and suggest tweaks in real time.
4. Meta
At Meta, dogfooding happens on a scale that only a few other companies can match. Thousands of employees use early builds of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp daily.
These versions often include unreleased features that are invisible to the public.
Meta calls this “Eat Your Own Dogfood” testing, and it’s handled through internal apps that push experimental updates to employee devices.
Engineers can toggle between live and test environments to simulate real-world conditions without risking the public product.
Another fascinating detail is that Meta’s internal dogfood version often collects detailed user behavior data, only to measure the performance impact of every new feature.
This allows Meta to predict user experience, something traditional QA simply cannot achieve.
How to start product dogfooding in your company
Thinking about starting dogfooding? Great move. But before you just tell everyone, “use this,” you need a plan. Below are steps to help you begin and run a dogfooding program that actually works.
After all, as Timothy R. Clark said,
Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.
That’s precisely why dogfooding matters.
📍Step 1: Picking the right participants
Don’t force the entire company to join in on day one. Begin by selecting employees who will bring the most varied perspectives. That usually means including employees from product, engineering, design, support, marketing, and operations.
Also include a few people outside product roles (sales, HR, office admin) to bring in fresh perspectives and catch things insiders might miss.
In this step, your main goal is to choose employees who are willing to speak up and give honest feedback. You need the ones who won’t be shy about complaining.
💡 Pro Tip
Make sure to provide them with a choice to opt in so they feel a sense of ownership rather than being forced.
📍Step 2: Selecting which products to dogfood
Not every product or feature needs dogfooding. Start with core modules or new features under development.
You might begin with internal tools or admin dashboards, where mistakes are lower risk, then expand to more customer-facing modules.
If your product is modular, pick slices (e.g., login flow, notifications, dashboard) and dogfood them first. Use this as a pilot to refine your approach, and over time, you can bring in larger or more integrated parts.
📍Step 3: Choosing a method to collect feedback
Without user feedback, your dogfooding program might fail. It’s one of the steps where most teams go wrong. To make dogfooding testing effective, you need a clear system for gathering and managing input in one organized place.
A great way to streamline this process is by using tools designed for structured feedback, such as UXtweak. It offers a complete toolkit that helps teams collect, store, and analyze insights in a better way.
Its advanced prototype testing tool allows you to simulate real user interactions with your designs, uncover usability issues, and ensure your ideas work seamlessly before investing in development.
You can also use its Usability Testing feature to watch how internal users interact with your product and identify pain points you might miss otherwise. 🐝
📍Step 4: Onboarding your internal testers
You can’t expect useful feedback if people don’t know how to use the product. Give your participants the same onboarding experience as real users: setup, tutorials, help docs, walkthroughs.
Moreover, encourage the testers to dive into real workflows. This means using the product or application in day-to-day tasks.
📍Step 5: Analyzing and closing the loop
After you collect feedback, you must act on what you’ve found. Here’s how you can do it:
👉 Organize feedback: First, filter out the repetitive concerns, tag them, and group similar comments.
👉 Prioritize fixes: Align feedback with your roadmap and business goals rather than treating every comment equally.
👉 Iterate quickly: Push changes, ask testers to re-evaluate, and then repeat the process.
👉 Report back: Show participants that their feedback was heard and used. This builds trust and motivation.
👉 Scale up: Once initial rounds produce stable results, expand to more employees or more product modules to dogfood.
Dogfooding vs fishfooding vs beta testing
If you’ve heard all three terms tossed around, you’re not alone. Many teams confuse dogfooding, fishfooding, and beta testing because they all involve using a product before it reaches the public.
But the difference lies in who tests the product, when they test it, and why they do it.
Aspect | Dogfooding | Fishfooding | Beta Testing |
Definition | Internal teams use the product themselves to uncover bugs, usability issues, and workflow gaps early. | A near-public version is shared with a small, trusted group outside the core team to test real-world performance. | Real external users test the product in a pilot testing phase to validate readiness before public release. |
Who Tests | Internal employees | Trusted partners | Real external users |
Stage of Product | Early internal build | Pre-release stable build | Near-final version |
Goal | Catch usability and functional issues early | Test product stability and compatibility in semi-real conditions | Validate performance, usability, and readiness through pilot testing |
Access Level | Internal only | Restricted, invite-only | Limited external release |
Potential downsides of product dogfooding
When not appropriately managed, dogfooding can introduce blind spots or harm user perception if implemented incorrectly. Here are some of the key downsides you should be aware of before committing to it:
⚠️ Downside 1: Biased feedback from internal users
The biggest limitation of dogfooding is internal bias. Your employees already have too much knowledge about the product’s inner workings.
Additionally, they understand its purpose, logic, and technical background, something real users never see. This makes it easy to overlook usability issues or confusing workflows that might frustrate a first-time user.
In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, internal testers often display “expert blindness,” meaning they unconsciously simplify or skip steps that normal users struggle with.
💡 Pro Tip
Keep this in mind — dogfooding can create bias if teams start assuming that what works for them automatically works for everyone.
⚠️ Downside 2: Slower development and resource drain
Dogfooding sounds nice to have, but in practice, it can slow things down, especially for small teams. Internal testing requires significant time for setup, training, bug reporting, follow-ups, and iteration cycles.
Due to that, engineers and designers usually become both creators and testers, stretching their bandwidth thin. Even though it’s not directly wasted time, it does decrease the product development velocity if processes aren’t clearly defined.
To avoid the same issue, consider assigning dedicated dogfooding coordinators or utilizing automation tools for report management.
⚠️ Downside 3: Overconfidence before beta testing
Another common pitfall is false confidence. After weeks of internal testing, teams might assume the product is “ready” because it works for them.
However, what works perfectly for developers in a controlled office network can behave differently for users. You might encounter a similar issue, as studies show that many problems identified during public beta go unnoticed during dogfooding.
That’s because employees usually use identical devices and environments. This limits the range of test conditions.
Wrapping Up
When your team uses the same product they create, they see its strengths and flaws more clearly.
But remember, dogfooding works best when done smartly. Make sure to keep feedback honest, involve cross-functional teams, and always follow up with structured data collection and analysis.
With UXtweak, you can easily collect feedback from internal testers to turn every comment, click, and observation into insights that shape better decisions. 🐝
📌 Example: If someone struggles with a feature in real time, they can flag it, and a fix begins almost immediately.