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Product Management vocabulary · Launches & Go-to-Market

Dogfooding

Meaning in product management, with examples

/ˈdɔːɡfuːdɪŋ/nounAdvanced term

In product management, dogfooding means: The practice of a company using its own product internally, often before release, to find problems and understand the user experience firsthand.

In Turkish: ürünü şirket içinde kullanmak, kendi ürününü kullanma

How it is used

Comes from the phrase eating your own dog food. Common in software companies: we're dogfooding the new version, a dogfooding period. It finds many bugs, but employees are not typical users, so it does not replace testing with real customers.

Example sentences

  1. We've been dogfooding the new calendar for two weeks, and it has already caught three serious bugs.

  2. Dogfooding showed us how annoying the daily notification really is.

Common collocations

  • dogfooding period
  • internal dogfooding
  • dogfood a feature
  • eat your own dog food
  • betaA test period, or a test version, in which a product or feature is released to a limited group of real users before the full launch.
  • feature flagA switch in the code that lets a team turn a feature on or off for some or all users without releasing a new version of the product.
  • launchThe moment a new product or feature is made available to users, together with the marketing, sales and support activities planned around it.
  • usability testingA research method in which real users try to complete tasks with a product or prototype while the team watches where they succeed, hesitate or fail.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Launches & Go-to-Market

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