Dogfooding

Scope

Covers

• Designing and running a dogfooding loop where the product team uses the product like a real user would
• Creating "creator commitments" when the product is for creators (e.g., publish a podcast, ship a workflow, run weekly reports)
• Capturing issues as reproducible artifacts (not vibes): logs, severity, decisions, owners, and follow-through

When to use

• "Set up a dogfooding program / dogfooding sprint for our product team."
• "We’re shipping soon—make sure we’re using the product daily and fixing the biggest pain."
• "We built this for creators; our team needs to be creators to understand the workflow."
• "Create an internal beta plan and a weekly dogfooding report template."

When NOT to use

• You need to validate market demand or solve who is the customer / what is the problem (do discovery first)
• The product team cannot realistically represent the workflow (e.g., regulated roles, hardware constraints) without proxies
• You’re looking for user research replacement (dogfooding complements -- not replaces -- external user feedback)