Editorial
The Gist
- Insider insights. A dogfooding strategy enhances product development and refines user experience.
- Employee involvement. Engaging all staff in product testing fosters diverse, actionable feedback.
- Effective feedback loops. Establishing efficient, empathetic internal feedback systems is crucial for product refinement.
If you don’t like or understand how to use the products you’re selling as a company, consider that a hint that your customers probably won’t either. One way to make sure you don’t fall into that category is to use your product like your customers would.
Internally, you put yourself in your customers’ shoes and observe your own reactions, experiences and feelings, an approach called dogfooding. Dogfooding sends a signal about which product ideas have the best chance of success, while uncovering technical issues and informing a smoother release. Just like customer feedback, it’s another powerful tool to help you create the best product possible.
At Slack, dogfooding is a core strategy in our product development cycle, and now that we’re a Salesforce company, our dog food bowl is bigger than ever. We now test new features on a much larger scale with tens of thousands of teammates, a change that has enabled us to better refine our dogfooding process and expand its impact to our product choices.
Here are some of the top tips we’ve learned and how you can incorporate them into your dogfooding process, whether you’re a big enterprise company or a growing start-up.
Lay a Solid Foundation With Dogfooding
Every successful dogfooding program needs a solid foundation of test subjects (also known as your co-workers). Initially, invite as many people to participate as you can, with the end goal of having everyone at your company dogfooding your product in some capacity. Your products should reflect the people that use them, so the broader the employee group with a diverse range of experiences, backgrounds and opinions, the better. This will help ensure that you're designing products that will work for the most comprehensive possible group.
Related Article: How to Leverage Customer Insights to Shape Product Strategy and Growth
Get Employees Invested
Positive results are likely when everyone is invited to participate, but you won’t reach the program’s full potential until your teammates are invested in it. One way to get employees excited is by giving them a behind-the-scenes look at product feedback directly from your external users. This has taken many different forms at Slack, with the main focus being live user-testing and feedback sessions. This can be achieved by traditional user research, of course, but sometimes we get creative so we can include more employees in the process.
We’ve invited folks from across all teams at Slack to watch and engage in video calls where a moderator leads a customer through a day in their life while sharing their computer screen. One time, my 70-year-old father was our guest user. Watching him navigate working in Slack to build his first startup and hearing him share his needs and wants was eye-opening for everyone.
Another program we run is called “Everyone Does Support.” This is exactly what it sounds like: an opportunity for teammates outside of our customer experience team to work directly with customers in a support capacity. This can look like regular, 1-to-2 hours sessions every week, or ad hoc sessions linked to major feature launches. Either way, the exposure gives your employees a new perspective on how their work is used after release.
Letting Employees See Firsthand
When employees see firsthand how people are putting their projects to work “in the real world,” we find that leads to a desire to make users’ overall experience better. How can employees immediately start having an impact on projects they aren’t directly working on? Well, they can dogfood and provide feedback, of course.
Related Article: Mastering Customer Feedback Management for Better Products
Focus on Feedback
Now that employees have become invested in participating, you can earn their trust by creating a reliable feedback loop. How will you collect internal feedback? How can you make it quick and painless for employees to provide it? How will you validate them by sending updates when their feedback has directly impacted your plans? Employees are taking time out of their workday to provide feedback, so you want to make it a positive experience.
More Informed Product Decisions
Smaller groups can use a simple workflow to collect data in Slack, making it easy for product teams and program leads to scan the results and reach out individually with follow-up questions. The product team can choose to engage directly with this feedback, dig deeper and learn why users feel a certain way, or how they came to their conclusion. This discussion will lead to more informed and empathetic product decisions.
To accommodate a much larger pool, we recommend using an in-product modal or form to expand your automated processes. For example, an employee can be prompted within the product experience to select from simple choices — such as a big smiley face if they like the new product or feature, a flat face if it’s just OK, and a frowning face if they don’t like it — along with a small text box to add details if they have more specific feedback.
Look for the Loudest Signals
Once employee feedback is in and ready to analyze, look for the loudest signals. Pay attention to whether a lot of people are having the same issue or reacting in a similar way, and look for trends within those signals. Do sales people tend to have similar feedback? Does that look different from your engineering team’s feedback?
Don’t ignore smaller signals, either! We know that you can’t fix every little thing or change things based on one person’s preference, but you can make a note of it so you’re prepared to address the concern when customers reach out to the support team after release.
Related Article: Teeing up Employee Experience to Enhance Customer Experience
Aim for 'Radical Candor'
Processing feedback from the people you work with can be a delicate operation. There may be instances where employees feel like they can’t truly be honest because they’re afraid to rock the boat. There are also power-users who are so comfortable with the product that they probably don’t use it in the same way as a lot of your customer base. How can you get accurate answers and avoid “superficial dogfooding” as much as possible?
No Incentives
The first step is to ensure no incentives are attached to the program. Don’t offer swag or free lunch for feedback, unless you want a lot of forced conversations from people who don’t actually care; they just want the prize. If you want thoughtful, actionable feedback (which you do!), the motivation must come from employees wanting to improve the product.
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Honesty Is the Goal
Second, ensure every employee feels comfortable sharing honestly by instilling radical candor as a core part of your program. From the onset of every new dogfooding experience, ensure employees know that mutually honest feedback is required for the rollout to be successful. Constructive criticism and discussions should be encouraged, not a source of defensiveness or dismissal.
Testing with co-workers also means that you can be honest and give them visibility into the process in ways you won’t necessarily be able to with customers, so use this to your advantage and help them understand the why, when and how of your plans. Model the honesty you seek!
At the end of the day, the success of a new feature or product is ultimately about the success of the company as a whole. Dogfooding is a great way to make a product that every employee believes in.
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