Eat your own dog food

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes joined by the cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, we're gonna talk a little bit about a term called dogfooding, which is basically in software using your own product to test it out before you are sharing it with customers. We do this internally at thirty seven signals, so I thought we would talk a little bit about the who, what, when, where, why we actually do this. So let's start first with the why. I think that's pretty simple, but when you guys wanna jump in, why do we actually dog food before we release something publicly? I mean, there's there's so many reasons. One reason is to know what to build next. As we've talked about in previous episodes, we we don't know the next six months worth of work. We don't know what it's gonna be. We know what we're doing now, and then we build it, and we use the thing we're building while we're building it. This is for new products specifically. And then we go, this is missing, or this is lacking, or this is good enough, or we really need this. And then you build something and you use it and you go, that didn't really do it. What else could we do? You just don't know. And that's the whole point. You don't know going into it. You have an idea of where you wanna go. You get into it, and then you don't know until you use it, and then you feel it out and the whole thing. So there's that. There's also the sense of this is the best way to figure out if it's any good, and you typically are putting it up against something else you're already doing because everyone's already doing something. Like, we're currently make we've talked about this. You know, we're making, like, a a bug issue tracking sort of thing, And we've done this in other ways. We've used to do list. We've used Kanban, card table in Basecamp. We've done it in other ways. Everyone's doing something in some way already. So what's nice about building something that and using it as you're building it is to go, is this better than the other way? Are we getting somewhere? Is there something interesting here? And then there's a point at which in when you're first starting, you're probably not gonna surpass what you're doing. But there's a point where you wanna get to where it feels like it clicks beyond, and you go, now we're better than what we had. There's something else here that's special. And you can't know that until you use it because you're using the other thing, so you've gotta compare the two things. And then also just it sparks ideas, and there's no better feeling than using the thing …