Eat your own dog food

Apr 23, 2025 · Summarized Apr 23, 2025

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Key takeaways

Dogfooding is essential for understanding product needs and ensuring quality.
Starting dogfooding early in development helps uncover real insights.
Feedback should be managed wisely to avoid confusion from too many opinions.
Utilizing real data in design and testing leads to better software outcomes.
Key decisions in product development are informed by a combination of team input and leadership direction.

Summary

The Concept of Dogfooding

In this episode, the hosts introduce the term 'dogfooding,' which refers to using your own product before releasing it to customers. This practice is implemented at 37signals to better understand how well a product works and to gather internal feedback.

Why Dogfooding Matters

The co-founders discuss the critical reasons for dogfooding, including understanding what to build next, improving product quality, and ensuring that the company’s tools meet real needs. They emphasize that real-world testing with actual users informs product development and helps identify missing features.

Timing and Feedback in Dogfooding

Jason and David highlight the timing of when to implement dogfooding in the development process. They suggest initiating internal use early, even if it's uncomfortable. The feedback process is crucial, and this includes filtering and prioritizing insights to guide the product's direction.

Building for Real Use

A central theme is the importance of building products that the team will actually use. They share anecdotes about how working with real data prevents delusions in design and ensures that the team creates quality products that solve genuine problems.

Handling Internal Feedback

The episode concludes with a discussion on how feedback from team members influences final decisions on product features. Decisions are made collaboratively, but ultimately some call to action needs to be taken, often by those closest to the product.

Show notes

Before anything ships at 37signals, the team puts it to the test—by using it themselves. In this episode of The REWORK Podcast, co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson talk about the importance of dogfooding, or using your own product before handing it off to customers. They share how this practice keeps them close to the real problems, and sometimes even kills off ideas that just don’t hold up.

Key Takeaways:

00:27 – Why every 37signals product is used internally before it ships
07:15 – Who makes the final call after internal feedback comes in
12:44 – The importance of building things you’ll actually use
16:48 – Some products and features don’t make it past internal testing

Links and Resources:

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