Eat the Dogfood You Serve Customers

In the book American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company (referred to me by a talented local entrepreneur), Mulally was mentioned as commenting how the Ford headquarters executive parking lot was filled with Jaguars and Range Rovers when he started as company CEO. Ford owned those brands at the time, but they were a small product line and not core to the business. Ford executives weren’t eating the dogfood they made for their customers.

For the first two years at Pardot we had separate production versions of our product for customers and product demos. The original thinking, which was my fault, was that we needed separate instances so that it would be easy to reset the database to have a consistent sales demo and test drive experience. It was the typical “data in the system will be reset every hour” type demo configuration. Only this proved to be a poor idea since it created more core engineering headaches (the code base had specific checks to see if it was in production or demo) and dev ops headaches (different databases, one had a load balancer and one didn’t, etc). Eventually, the two systems were updated on different schedules with production being a high priority over demo, resulting in demo constantly being behind. We didn’t let the sales team eat the dogfood we served customers and things suffered as a result.

Only when you’re living with the same experience as your customers can you deliver the best product. For the organization to achieve it’s full potential, it’s critical that you eat your own dogfood.

What else? What are some other examples of companies not using their own core products or services?