dogfood

(computing, slang) To use products or services one is selling internally, in order to understand their limitations.

The mindset of someone who has become deeply convinced that the only way to build good products is to use them yourself — and who can't stop evangelizing this belief to anyone who will listen. Dogfood pilled engineers are the ones who turn every meeting into a conversation about whether the team is actually using what they're building, and who treat shipping something you wouldn't personally use as a moral failure. They're often right. They can also be exhausting. But the products that come out of dogfood-pilled teams tend to have a quality of care that users notice immediately.

A deliberate moment of evaluation where a team or individual actually uses their own product to assess its quality — pausing to ask whether anyone here is genuinely relying on what they've built or just demoing it to themselves. The dogfood check is the difference between a product that gets used because it has to be and one that gets used because it actually solves a problem. Teams that fail the dogfood check are usually the last to know how bad their product has gotten. It's not about feedback forms; it's about whether you'd voluntarily open the thing on your day off.

(idiomatic) To use or consume the economic goods or services that one is producing; to be part of a closed household economy.