Dogfooding
Using your own product internally before releasing it to customers, named from the phrase eating your own dog food.
What is Dogfooding?
Dogfooding means your team uses the product daily for real work, not just testing. This uncovers usability issues, bugs, and missing features that QA might miss. Examples: Slack built Slack to solve their own communication problem. Figma uses Figma to design Figma. GitHub hosts its code on GitHub. Dogfooding builds empathy for users and forces you to prioritize what actually matters. If your team avoids using the product, that's a red flag. The downside: your team's needs might not match customers. Slack's engineers wanted advanced features; small teams needed simplicity. Balance internal feedback with customer feedback. Dogfooding works best for B2B SaaS and developer tools where the builder and user overlap.
Examples
Figma's own design team builds Figma inside Figma, and GitHub hosts and manages its own source code on GitHub. Both companies rely on daily internal use to surface bugs and missing features before customers ever encounter them.