Dogfooding

Eating your own dog food, or ‘dogfooding’, is the quirky yet effective practice where an organization uses its own product internally. Imagine your company developed a note-taking app – you’d be jotting down all your brilliant ideas and daily to-dos right in your own app. If you built the software, you’d rely on it to solve the very problems it was designed to tackle 🥊

The term has a fun origin story. It all started with a 1976 Alpo dog food commercial, where actor Lorne Greene proudly declared that he fed Alpo to his own dog.

Fast forward to 1988, and Paul Maritz, a Microsoft employee, sent an internal email titled ‘Eating our own dog food’. He urged a manager to boost the company’s internal use of their own product. And just like that, the term ‘dogfooding’ was officially born ✨