"Eating your own dog food"—or "dogfooding"—sounds unappetizing, yet it's become the tech industry's favorite meal. This practice involves companies rigorously using their own products internally before unleashing them on unsuspecting customers. Microsoft employees debug Outlook while managing their actual emails, and Apple stopped using typewriters in 1980 to prove their computers were superior.
The metaphor likely originated from dog food executives who claimed they fed their products to their own pets—the ultimate quality guarantee. Microsoft popularized the term in 1988 when manager Paul Maritz challenged colleagues to start "eating our own dogfood." Today's corporate version is equally revealing: if your employees won't use your software, why should anyone else? Dogfooding exposes glitches that sterile laboratory testing misses, like discovering your video conferencing app crashes precisely when presenting quarterly results.
This self-imposed culinary experiment transforms employees into reluctant product evangelists, ensuring companies serve customers something they'd actually consume themselves—metaphorically speaking, of course.