Dogfooding

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)
• The only goal is "QA everything" (use a QA/test plan; dogfooding is for experience + value + workflow realism)
• You need structured usability testing with real external users, task completion metrics, and think-aloud protocols (use usability-testing)
• You’re planning the actual product launch/release rollout (use shipping-products)
• You need a design critique session to evaluate visual/interaction quality (use running-design-reviews)
• You want to build a framework for developing product taste and quality intuition (use product-taste-intuition)

Inputs

Minimum required

• Product summary + target user persona (who it’s for; what job it does)
• 1–3 core workflows to dogfood (end-to-end)
• Time box + cadence (e.g., 1 week sprint; 20 min/day; weekly triage)
• Participants (roles) + any "creator commitments" required
• Environment constraints (prod vs staging; data/privacy constraints; access constraints)

Missing-info strategy

• Ask up to 5 questions from references/INTAKE.md.
• If answers aren’t available, proceed with explicit assumptions and label unknowns. Offer 2 scope options (lean vs thorough).

Outputs (deliverables)

Produce a Dogfooding Pack in Markdown (in-chat; or as files if requested):

1. Context snapshot (product, persona, workflows, constraints, time box)
2. Dogfooding charter (goals, participants, rules, cadence, definitions)
3. Scenario map + routines (daily/weekly tasks + "creator commitments")
4. Dogfooding log + triage board spec (fields, severity scale, decision rules)
5. Weekly dogfooding report (insights, decisions, shipped fixes, next experiments)
6. Risks / Open questions / Next steps (always included)

Templates: references/TEMPLATES.md

Workflow (7 steps)

1) Frame the dogfooding goal (experience, not just bugs)

• Inputs: Product summary; desired outcomes; references/INTAKE.md.
• Actions: Define what "success" means for this cycle (e.g., "team can complete workflow A in <10 min without workarounds"). Set constraints (environment, data, access).
• Outputs: Context snapshot + explicit success criteria.
• Checks: Success criteria are measurable and tied to a real workflow outcome (not "feel better").

2) Define representative scenarios + "creator commitments"

• Inputs: Target persona + workflows.
• Actions: Create 3–8 scenarios that represent real user goals. If the product is for creators, define a publish cadence (e.g., "each PM publishes 1 artifact/week").
• Outputs: Scenario map + routine plan.
• Checks: At least 1 scenario is "from scratch → shipped/published" end-to-end.

3) Set up the capture system (log, severity, triage)

• Inputs: Existing tools (Jira/Linear/Notion/Sheets) or "none".
• Actions: Define the dogfooding log schema, severity scale, and triage rules. Decide labels/tags to link issues to scenarios and workflow steps.
• Outputs: Dogfooding log + triage board spec.
• Checks: Any issue can be reproduced with a clear "steps to reproduce + expected vs actual + evidence".

4) Run daily dogfooding sessions (time-boxed)

• Inputs: Scenario map + routines.
• Actions: Each participant runs 1–2 scenarios/day, captures friction immediately, and attaches evidence (screens, logs, timestamps). Record "workarounds used".
• Outputs: Daily log entries + a rolling "top pains" list.
• Checks: Entries are concrete (repro steps) and prioritized by impact on completing the workflow.

5) Triage weekly: decide, assign, and protect focus

• Inputs: Log + top pains.
• Actions: Run triage: cluster duplicates, classify (bug/UX debt/gap/docs), assign owners, and decide "fix now / schedule / won’t fix (with reason)". Update scenario map if it was unrealistic.
• Outputs: Prioritized backlog + decision notes.
• Checks: Top 3–5 issues map directly to blocked/slow scenarios and have an owner + next action.

6) Ship loop: verify fixes by dogfooding again (no-ship gate)

• Inputs: "Fix now" items + release plan.
• Actions: For each fix, re-run the scenario end-to-end. Apply a simple gate: "We can complete the scenario with no hidden workarounds in the chosen environment."
• Outputs: Verified fixes list + any regressions.
• Checks: The gate is based on completing scenarios, not just closing tickets.

7) Report + quality gate + next cycle plan

• Inputs: Final log + triage outcomes.
• Actions: Produce the weekly report. Run references/CHECKLISTS.md and score with references/RUBRIC.md. Add Risks/Open questions/Next steps and propose the next dogfooding cycle focus.
• Outputs: Final Dogfooding Pack.
• Checks: Report contains decisions (what changed) and shows evidence-backed learning (not just a bug list).

Anti-patterns (common failure modes)

1. Bug-list-only dogfooding. Treating the dogfooding program as a QA bug bash instead of an experience evaluation. The team files cosmetic bugs but never evaluates whether the core workflow is coherent and valuable.
2. Tourist mode. Participants click around casually instead of committing to real end-to-end scenarios. The feedback is shallow ("looks fine") because nobody completed a meaningful task.
3. Internal-user bias blindness. Assuming internal team members represent real users without acknowledging their expert knowledge, muscle memory, and workaround tolerance. Findings don’t transfer to actual users.
4. Log without triage. Capturing hundreds of issues in a spreadsheet but never running a triage session. Issues pile up, owners are never assigned, and the dogfooding program loses credibility.
5. One-and-done sprint. Running a single dogfooding sprint before launch and never repeating. The program produces a snapshot but no continuous improvement loop.

Quality gate (required)

• Use references/CHECKLISTS.md and references/RUBRIC.md.
• Always include: Risks, Open questions, Next steps.

Examples

Example 1 (Creator product): "We’re building a podcast creation tool. Create a dogfooding program where the whole team publishes 1 short episode/week, and produce a weekly report template." Expected: scenarios from "idea to published episode", creator commitments, log schema, triage cadence, and ship gate tied to publishing.

Example 2 (B2B workflow product): "Set up a 2-week dogfooding sprint for our AI meeting notes tool focused on ‘record to summary to share to action items’." Expected: scenario map, daily routine, severity scale, triage rules, weekly report, and a verified-fixes list.

Boundary example (usability testing): "Run a usability study with 5 external users to measure task completion rates." Response: use usability-testing for structured external user research; dogfooding is for internal team experience evaluation.

Boundary example (launch planning): "We finished dogfooding; now plan the rollout to real users." Response: use shipping-products to plan the launch; dogfooding validates internal readiness, not external release execution.

Boundary example (no artifact): "Dogfood this idea we haven’t built yet." Response: dogfooding requires a usable artifact; propose discovery + prototype/usability testing first, then a dogfooding sprint once there’s something to run end-to-end.