Eating Your Own Dog Food

How often does this happen? I mean using your own application that is under the development phase. Reason: if you feel comfortable and convenient using it then only you can expect the same with your customers.

Our flagship product ‘My Desire’ (no, it’s not a porn site) is a Multitask/Multiproject management tool. And we have been using it for our own internal projects and task management. There’s no lying when I say that MyD was developed using MyD.

Our intentions behind eating our own dog food: Use it yourself even if it has bugs and limited features and functionalities until it frustrates you to the extent that you have to fix it or live with it. In fact it’s a learning curve. We have so many ‘Aha’ moments using it for our daily use. Many features were added as we felt the necessity of those things (yes we listen to our customers and client too).

Many of the features which we (programmers and developers) thought cool were confused by our clients. e.g.: in Myd we previously had this feature of displaying the internal panel window in three stages, minimized, maximized and normal view. For developers, minimizing a panel would create enough space for other windows. However it was not the expected behavior for the normal users as they have seen very few of those kind of minimizing windows.

Back to the dog food.  Now in MyD, we have various features which are the result of our own personal requirements that we felt necessary. Lately I accidently accepted a task that was assigned to a group of which I was a member of but the task wasn’t of my domain (this is the task assigning functionality of MyD). Mistake. Now I can’t undo it. That was one of the ‘Aha’ moments. We need the undo feature in the myd product.

Eating your own dog food indeed helps you to make you more aware of your product. Instead of client Mr. X complaining about the lack of the feature or a bug, it’s always good to find that within your team. So use your products to make it better.

Btw, when are we adding that ‘undo’ feature to MyD? .. Dev? .. Prashant? .. Klaus?