# Dogfooding: The Difference Between Ideas and Results — Pilot to Production

> Ideas are free and all sound good. Using your own product in anger is the only honest test. Why dogfooding teams ship truer products, and how to start.

Canonical: https://thegrowthproject.com/podcast/dogfooding-ideas-vs-results/

*Pilot to Production*, the Growth Project podcast — hosted by Sam and Maya.

- Listen: https://thegrowthproject.com/podcast/dogfooding-ideas-vs-results/
- Read the article: https://thegrowthproject.com/blog/dogfooding-ideas-vs-results/
- Audio: https://thegrowthproject.com/audio/podcast/dogfooding-ideas-vs-results.m4a?v=0dd6242d

## Transcript

**Sam:** Ten minutes. Five real bugs.

**Maya:** That's what happened the first time we stopped reviewing our own software and started actually using it to do real work.

**Sam:** Not clicking through a demo. Using it. The way you'd use it on a busy day, with no patience for it being broken.

**Maya:** To get something done before lunch.

**Sam:** Welcome to Pilot to Production, from the Growth Project. I'm Sam.

**Maya:** And I'm Maya. Today: dogfooding, and why using your own product in anger is the only honest test it ever gets.

**Sam:** Okay, but every team says they dogfood. What's actually different here?

**Maya:** Almost none of them do. They agree it's good. Then they build the product with one hand and avoid using it with the other.

**Sam:** Why? If they believe in it, why dodge it?

**Maya:** Because there's always an escape hatch. The old tool still works. The spreadsheet is right there. And there's the magic phrase: I'll use it properly once it's a bit more finished.

**Sam:** I have said that exact sentence. Out loud. In a standup.

**Maya:** Everyone has. And the gap between idea and result never closes, because nobody's standing in the gap.

**Sam:** So back up. What's wrong with ideas? Ideas are how anything gets built.

**Maya:** Nothing's wrong with them. They're free, and they all sound good in the room. The slide is clean, the logic holds, everyone nods, someone says ship it.

**Sam:** And then someone builds it.

**Maya:** And the two clicks are actually six. The second one's in a place nobody looks. And the error message it throws is a stack trace.

**Sam:** The idea wasn't wrong though.

**Maya:** It was never wrong. It was just untested. Ideas don't have edge cases. Products do.

**Sam:** Here's where you'll get pushback. We do design review. We catch things. That's the safety net.

**Maya:** Design review catches the wrong bugs. The ones you can see on a screen, in a calm room, with someone narrating the happy path.

**Sam:** And the ones it misses?

**Maya:** The bug that only shows up when you're tired, in a hurry, holding a real piece of work in your head and trying to get it out the door.

**Sam:** Why does review keep missing those?

**Maya:** Because review is a conversation about a thing, not contact with the thing. And a conversation always flatters the design. The person presenting it knows where the bodies are buried, and steers around them. Unconsciously. Every time.

**Sam:** So what's the line? Testing versus this in-anger thing?

**Maya:** Testing is QA mode. You're patient, you expect things to be a bit broken, you forgive the friction. Using it in anger is when you have somewhere to be. You're not thinking about the product at all. You're thinking about the work.

**Sam:** And the second the product slows you down...

**Maya:** You feel it as your problem, not a test result. That feeling is the entire signal. And you cannot fake it. You can't schedule it. You can't assign it to QA.

**Sam:** This is the day-three thing, right?

**Maya:** It is. Products that aren't dogfooded are optimised for the demo. They feel great for ninety seconds, then quietly fail you on day three, when you hit the thing nobody on the team ever did, because nobody on the team uses the product.

**Sam:** And your users live on day three.

**Maya:** Every day is day three for them. If you don't live there, you're shipping blind.

**Sam:** Okay. First thing tomorrow. Someone's listening and wants to actually do this. Where do they start?

**Maya:** Pick one real task you do every day. Not a test scenario. A genuine, recurring piece of work you currently do with some other tool. Move it onto your own product. Today.

**Sam:** And the old tool?

**Maya:** Remove it from reach if you can. The escape hatch is the enemy. If escaping is easy, you'll escape. Then time the first run and write down every snag. Where you hesitated, what you had to look up, what made you swear.

**Sam:** Then fix them.

**Maya:** Fix what you hit, in the order you hit it. Friction you felt first is friction your users feel most. Don't triage by theory. Triage by your own swearing. And make it a standing rule, not a sprint. One day of dogfooding is a stunt. Daily dogfooding is a culture.

**Sam:** The goal isn't finding every bug.

**Maya:** The goal is to feel what your users feel, before they feel it. A meeting can tell you an idea is good. Only use can tell you a product is.

**Sam:** This has been Pilot to Production, from the Growth Project. If your product demos beautifully but fails on day three, that's the gap we close, at thegrowthproject.com.

**Maya:** Thanks for listening. See you next time.