Eat your own dog food

What It Covers

37signals cofounders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson explain their dogfooding practice of using products internally with real data before public release, driving feature decisions and product quality through direct team experience.

Key Questions Answered

• •Real data requirement: Teams must use products with actual work data, not test scenarios or lorem ipsum placeholders, to expose edge cases like image cropping issues and flow problems that only surface under genuine usage conditions.
• •Early uncomfortable adoption: Start internal usage before features feel ready, layering in more users gradually while everyone tolerates incomplete functionality. This discomfort drives learning about what's missing and what works better than existing solutions being replaced.
• •Designer autonomy through code: Designers work directly in running software rather than Figma mockups, making micro-decisions about flows and features they encounter daily. This proximity to problems produces better solutions than top-down specifications covering every screen in advance.
• •Neglected flows expose gaps: Sign-up processes and other infrequently used features degrade because teams don't encounter them regularly. Force quarterly reviews of these critical first-impression touchpoints to maintain quality standards across the entire product experience.