Dogfooding meaning: using your own product first
Dogfooding means a company's own staff use its product before customers do, often in an unfinished version. That way the staff hit the bugs first. It's short for "eating your own dog food".
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We're dogfooding the new timesheet app, Ruth, so everyone fills it in from Monday.
What did they mean?
Filed under D jargon.
What dogfooding means
Dogfooding at a tech company
Dogfooding is a company using its own product, usually before customers get it. At a tech company, that means engineers running the test build of the app they’re making. The long form is “eating your own dog food”.
In our jargon dictionary, dogfooding is filed under strategy, with tiger team and move the needle.
Why companies do it
Companies dogfood so their own staff hit the problems before a customer does. A company with a bias for action can release early to its own people instead of waiting for a perfect version.
But staff know the workarounds, so 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. Some of them ran mission critical systems, so planes couldn’t take off and family doctors couldn’t treat patients.
At a US Congress hearing that September, the company said its main fix would be far more internal testing before release. A 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 more testing means slower releases.
Where eat your own dog food comes from
The dog food stories
Nobody has pinned down where the dog food phrase started, and no dictionary dates it. Most tellings credit Microsoft in the late 1980s. These two written traces have firm dates.
| Year | A trace of dogfood |
|---|---|
| 1999 | A Mozilla bug report, filed October 9, with DOGFOOD next to BETA in its title |
| 2012 | A software testing book saying most Microsoft product teams eat their own dog food |
Dogfooding outside software
The idea works away from screens too. A carmaker whose managers drive its own cars is dogfooding.
Drink your own champagne
“Drinking our own champagne” is the same practice, in words that sound better at a sales conference. The 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 internal tools that staff didn’t pick and their builders never touch. The usual ones are the expense tool, the timesheet and the intranet search that finds nothing.
Dogfood week
Dogfood week is when everyone moves to the new chat app on Monday and the old one is switched off on Tuesday. It 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.
When the dogfood stays in the bowl
Some products never reach the staff who make them. The head office keeps the old system, and only customers get the new one. Running on your own product is table stakes if you want to sell it with a straight face.
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.
Dogfooding in a sentence
We're dogfooding the new timesheet app, Ruth, so everyone fills it in from Monday.
Engineering stopped dogfooding the chat app after it lost a week of messages.
If we're not dogfooding the expense tool, why would clients trust it, Odile?
Leadership says we'll dogfood the new HR portal, Tamsin, starting with their own expense claims.
Questions about dogfooding
What does dogfooding mean in tech?
In tech, dogfooding means staff use their company's product before customers do, usually while it's still a test version. The bugs land on them first, which is the point.
What does "drink your own champagne" mean?
It's another name for dogfooding, a company using what it sells. People choose it 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. By October 1999, a Mozilla bug report had DOGFOOD in its title. A 2012 testing book calls it the habit of most Microsoft product teams.
Is dogfooding the same as beta testing?
No. Beta testers are usually outside users who signed up for it. Dogfooding means your own staff, who often had no say.
What is dogfooding in product management?
In product management, dogfooding is a stage before launch where staff use the new version and report what breaks. The product manager says what's being tested and for how long, and gets the top complaints fixed before customers see them.