A deliberate moment of evaluation where a team or individual actually uses their own product to assess its quality — pausing to ask whether anyone here is genuinely relying on what they've built or just demoing it to themselves.
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The revealing moment when a team tries to use their own product and it breaks — exposing the gap between how a product was designed to be used and how it actually performs under real conditions. The dogfood fail is the product builder's version of a reality check: you sat through all the demos, approved all the features, nodded at every sprint review, and then opened the thing yourself and immediately hit a wall that users have apparently been hitting for months. It's embarrassing, educational, and almost always preventable if dogfooding had happened earlier.
Using your own product internally. "Eat your own dog food." Exposes bugs before customers do and forces the team to care about the experience.
The operational state where a team is actively running, using, and depending on their own product in day-to-day work — not just testing it but actually relying on it like an external user would. Dogfood mode is a shift in posture: you stop treating the product as a thing you're building and start treating it as a tool you need. It reveals problems that no QA process catches, because the feedback is immediate, personal, and comes with actual frustration attached. Companies that stay in dogfood mode tend to build better products; companies that leave it get surprised by their own launch.
A deliberate moment of evaluation where a team or individual actually uses their own product to assess its quality — pausing to ask whether anyone here is genuinely relying on what they've built or just demoing it to themselves. The dogfood check is the difference between a product that gets used because it has to be and one that gets used because it actually solves a problem. Teams that fail the dogfood check are usually the last to know how bad their product has gotten. It's not about feedback forms; it's about whether you'd voluntarily open the thing on your day off.
Before we ship this, everyone do a dogfood check — open the app, try to do something real with it, and report back what broke.