eating your own dog food

Definition

Using your own company's products or services internally, forcing employees to experience the same pain points as customers. Also reveals whether your software is actually usable or hot garbage.

Example Usage

We're eating our own dog food by switching to our new CRM—turns out our user interface is way more confusing than we thought.

Origin

Tech industry term from the 1980s, possibly originating from a 1970s Alpo dog food commercial

Fun Fact

Microsoft coined the phrase 'dogfooding' in 1988, and the practice helped them catch thousands of bugs before product launches.

Source: Technology and product development terminology

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