There are two important lessons I learned in my early product days. First, you are not your own customer. Even if you're the inventor or absolutely passionate about your product, you are not its primary user. To build truly great solutions, you must step outside your own perspective and learn from those who actually use your service or offering.

The second lesson is all about dogfooding. This is the practice of using your own product, tools, or services on a daily basis to genuinely understand how they work in real-world scenarios. In software development, it's vital that everyone involved—engineers, UX specialists, sales teams, and anyone connected to the product—actively uses it. Experiencing the frustrations caused by bugs, noticing imperfections, and appreciating the unique features helps you improve your offering. The art of 'eating your own dog food' is essential for continuous development, empowering you to sell, convince, and ultimately succeed. Those closest to a solution are best placed to quickly recognise and fix issues.

What's your experience with this?

Dogfooding as a Consultant

As consultants, many of us aren't building new technologies, solutions, or services from scratch for clients. So, why should we dogfood? Our clients rely on us for expertise, guidance, and practical solutions. When we help organisations implement AI, security measures, cloud solutions, or new tools, they inevitably ask, "What's your experience with this?" For instance, after rolling out privacy or confidentiality labels, how did we ensure every new page, note, document, or file was labelled correctly? How did we organise and communicate within our own teams?

Clients may also ask, "How do you use Copilot Studio, and when do you choose Teams or the web interface?" Or, "What are the Agents that have helped you?"

Of course, we can reference use cases from Microsoft sales documents or other well-known sources. But that isn't true dogfooding. Genuine insight comes from experiencing the challenges first-hand—for example, the frustration of being unable to post in Copilot Studio due to an unexpected issue, and then figuring out how to resolve it. Or the irritation when Copilot or ChatGPT provides subpar answers, and the process of learning to prompt better and collaborate with these tools day to day.

Dogfooding puts us in our customers' shoes and helps us become genuine consulting partners. So, yes, dogfooding remains highly relevant. When asked why I build agents or continually experiment with our own product and service offerings, this is the reason. I strive to leverage every product in M365, building agents, failing, trying again, getting frustrated, learning, and improving. Most importantly, I send feedback to product teams in Copilot, Word, Excel, Loop, and every other product I use when I encounter bugs or have ideas for new features and refinements. Without feedback, product teams have no way of knowing what needs to be improved.

Dogfooding isn't just about using your own tools—it's about fostering empathy with users, driving meaningful improvements, and building credibility as a trusted consultant. Let's embrace the practice and keep the feedback loop alive.

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