Dogfooding meaning: using your own product first
Dogfooding means a company's own staff use its product, often an unfinished version, before customers do, so the staff hit the bugs first. It's short for "eating your own dog food".
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Dogfooding.
means using it ourselves first
Filed under D jargon.
What dogfooding means
Dogfooding at a tech company
Dogfooding is a company using its own product internally, usually before release. Engineers run the test build of the app they’re making. The sales team works in the sales software the company sells. Dictionaries file the word as informal, and as computing slang: testing a new product on staff before the public gets it.
The long form is “eating your own dog food”. People also say “we dogfood it”, “the dogfood build” and “dogfood week”.
Why companies do it
The logic is blunt. If the product is good enough to sell, it’s good enough for the people who made it. If it isn’t, they find out before a customer does, usually by losing an afternoon to it.
Staff make cheap testers in one way and poor ones in another. They use the product every day, which finds bugs fast. The same people know the workarounds, hold admin rights and sit next to the engineer who can fix it. A product that’s fine for its builders can still baffle everyone else.
Dogfooding after an outage
In July 2024, a faulty update from a security company crashed Windows computers around the world, a mission critical failure if there ever was one. At a US Congress hearing that September, the company named its main fix: far more internal testing before release, and customers choosing when to take updates.
One technology editor covering the hearing wrote that she had learned a new term for it: dogfooding. The company was pushing out 10 to 12 updates a day, so the extra testing has a cost in speed.
Where eat your own dog food comes from
The dog food stories
Nobody has nailed down the start, and no dictionary dates it. One dictionary quotes a 2012 software testing book saying most Microsoft product teams eat their own dog food.
One dated trace sits in public view. On October 9, 1999, a Mozilla bug report went in with a DOGFOOD tag in its title, next to BETA. Whoever filed it already treated the word as shorthand.
Dogfooding outside software
The idea works away from screens too. A carmaker whose managers drive its own cars is dogfooding. So is a restaurant whose staff eat the kitchen’s food after a shift, or a bank whose staff keep their own accounts there. In each case, the people closest to the product meet its faults before the customers write in.
Drink your own champagne
The same practice also goes by “drinking our own champagne”, which sounds better at a sales conference. Plainer, “we use it too” works in any meeting and promises nothing about taste.
Dogfooding at the office
The internal tools nobody chose
Plenty of offices run on tools their builders never touch. The expense tool, the timesheet and the intranet search that finds nothing were all built or bought by people who rarely use them. That expense tool would be fixed by Friday if the team that built it had to file its own taxi receipts.
Dogfood week
Dogfood week is when everyone moves to the new chat app on Monday and the old one is switched off on Tuesday. Feedback goes into a channel named after the dog food. It fills with screenshots of the same bug, each posted by someone who didn’t scroll up.
Dogfood week goes better with three rules. Tell staff what is being tested and for how long. Fix the top five complaints before the customer launch, starting with the low-hanging fruit, and say that you did. Keep the old tool alive for a week, for the payroll run that can’t wait.
A company with a bias for action ships fast and dogfoods first, so its own staff take the first hit. Among the product words in the jargon dictionary, this one makes the people who say it suffer for it first.
When the dogfood stays in the bowl
Some products never reach the staff who make them. The head office keeps the old system while customers get the new one. Using your own product is table stakes for selling it with a straight face. A seller that skips it has some explaining to do.
An all-staff email about dogfooding
Subject: New expense app, starting Monday
From Monday the whole company is
dogfoodingstuck using the new expense app, a month before clients get it. The old forms stop working on Friday at 5. Post bugs in #expenses-beta with a screenshot, and keep your paper receipts for now.
Questions about dogfooding
What does dogfooding mean in tech?
Using your own product inside the company, usually a test version, before customers get it. The bugs land on the staff first, which is the point.
What does "drink your own champagne" mean?
The same as eating your own dog food: a company uses what it sells. It's the version people choose when they'd rather not compare their product to dog food.
Where does "eat your own dog food" come from?
Nobody has documented the start. Mozilla's bug tracker was tagging bugs DOGFOOD by October 1999, and a 2012 testing book calls it the habit of most Microsoft product teams.
Is dogfooding the same as beta testing?
Close, with one difference. Beta testers are usually outside users who signed up for it. Dogfooding means your own staff, who often had no say.