Dogfooding (short for "eating your own dog food") is a term that's thrown around a lot in tech. It simply means using your own product or service internally—just like your customers would. It’s basically walking the walk, not just talking the talk. If you're building something you expect others to use, you should be your own first and most loyal user.


Why Do Companies Dogfood?

Dogfooding is more than just a vanity exercise. It’s a practical and powerful tool for building better software. Here’s why:

  • Quality: You catch bugs, UX friction, and performance issues earlier because you're living with the product every day.
  • Empathy: You develop a real understanding of what your users go through. You’re not guessing; you’re feeling it firsthand.
  • Feedback: Internal teams can provide fast, honest, and actionable feedback—often before external users even touch it.
  • Credibility: It shows confidence in what you're building. If you won’t use your product, why should anyone else?


If You’re Not Using It, Why Build It?

If you're building a product and you're trying to make it best-in-class—but you're not using it yourself—it raises a fundamental question:

Does it even solve your own problems?

And if it doesn’t, then why are you building it? Who is it for?

If you're not dogfooding your product, you're essentially outsourcing empathy. You’re disconnected from the very pain points you’re supposed to be solving. That’s dangerous for product development. It leads to surface-level solutions, poor UX decisions, and a gap between intention and reality.


A Classic Example

Let’s say your team is building a chat app. If your entire company switches to using that app for internal communication instead of Slack or Teams, that’s dogfooding. You’ll quickly learn what works, what’s annoying, what’s broken, and what’s missing. And that insight is gold.


A Personal Example: Awelgorithms and Rad UI

Take this blog, Awelgorithms, as an example. It’s built entirely with Rad UI—my own open-source, headless React UI library. I could’ve just built this blog with a more mature, well-documented library like Radix UI or Chakra UI, but then I’d never really understand where Rad UI falls short.

By using my own UI library to build a real-world project, I’m constantly stress-testing it. And since this blog is pretty simple, it acts as a great proving ground:

  • It needs basic building blocks like Heading, Text, Badge (for blog categories).
  • It needs light mode / dark mode toggling (which Rad UI supports out of the box).
  • And then there are things like... pagination.

Now that’s interesting. I realized while building the blog that I needed a pagination component. It’s such a common feature in blogs, dashboards, admin tools—you name it. Yet Rad UI didn’t have one.

Boom—new insight.

That gap between my product and my real-world use case? That’s a pain point. And I only noticed it because I was dogfooding. Maybe I'll update the blog with the Pagination component I build on Rad UI. I even created an issue to track this idea


TL;DR

Dogfooding isn’t just about pride—it’s a practical, tactical move when you’re building something you want others to use. It shortens the feedback loop, builds empathy, and gives you confidence in what you’re putting into the world.

If you don’t use your own product, why should anyone else?

Have you ever had to dogfood something at work? What did you learn from it?