I joined Marketplace ~ 2 years back while you were still at Meta. When I checked out the feedback group , I used to see you regularly post about the experience and used to wonder how come you had the time to prioritize this over other things on your plate. However fast-forward to today, I make it a point to use the product on a very regular basis and understand how valuable this exercise is! Using the product has given me so much more insights without looking at the actual code. Thank you for setting up that culture and leading by example!
I always saw dogfooding as an important part of my job whether I was an IC PM, PMM or the leader of the team. Knowing your own product inside and out made me a better product thinker and helped build user empathy.
Thank you so much for sharing such a great insight!
As I'm building a product and dogfooding by ourselves, this article really resonated with us!
Here's a list of quotes that I really resonated with and my notes:
* Dogfooding forces you to experience a product as your users do—not just in a theoretical or roadmap sense, but in a real, practical, everyday sense.
* A common pitfall that we fall into when we get really close to our product is forgetting what it's like to be a new user. This makes it easier to overlook issues that might be obvious to an outsider.
* One thing I encourage you to do is to sign up for your service again, using a brand new account. Do this every few months to stay up-to-date on the experience, and to remind yourself that there's always more to learn and improve.
=> Note: people often forget about this!
* We're building products for people who may not have computers, or phones worth a thousand dollars apiece, and if we forget that, we risk leaving them out of the equation.
Q: did the team move quickly to retire the old messaging platform because they ate the dog food and now understood the pain points; or did the team do so to avoid the pain? From the way it was described it sounds like the latter. The team knew the product was broken but they didn't have a sense of urgency until they were "punished".
When we were asked to move to Android or the team moved to internal messaging, it was not a punishment, but a chance to open our eyes to seeing the world in a different way. Often we know there is friction for a user, but until you feel it viscerally, it is hard to quantify or articulate.
Product choices are not binary. There are many dimensions and ways to solve a problem. The most important input is whether or not you understand the problem from the user perspective so that you are addressing it proactively.
I joined Marketplace ~ 2 years back while you were still at Meta. When I checked out the feedback group , I used to see you regularly post about the experience and used to wonder how come you had the time to prioritize this over other things on your plate. However fast-forward to today, I make it a point to use the product on a very regular basis and understand how valuable this exercise is! Using the product has given me so much more insights without looking at the actual code. Thank you for setting up that culture and leading by example!
I always saw dogfooding as an important part of my job whether I was an IC PM, PMM or the leader of the team. Knowing your own product inside and out made me a better product thinker and helped build user empathy.
Thank you so much for sharing such a great insight!
As I'm building a product and dogfooding by ourselves, this article really resonated with us!
Here's a list of quotes that I really resonated with and my notes:
* Dogfooding forces you to experience a product as your users do—not just in a theoretical or roadmap sense, but in a real, practical, everyday sense.
* A common pitfall that we fall into when we get really close to our product is forgetting what it's like to be a new user. This makes it easier to overlook issues that might be obvious to an outsider.
* One thing I encourage you to do is to sign up for your service again, using a brand new account. Do this every few months to stay up-to-date on the experience, and to remind yourself that there's always more to learn and improve.
=> Note: people often forget about this!
* We're building products for people who may not have computers, or phones worth a thousand dollars apiece, and if we forget that, we risk leaving them out of the equation.
=> Note: have a global mindset always.
Thank you so much again!
Reference: https://glasp.co/#/kazuki/?p=lFhKe4VXyV4ktZDl9Evz
Q: did the team move quickly to retire the old messaging platform because they ate the dog food and now understood the pain points; or did the team do so to avoid the pain? From the way it was described it sounds like the latter. The team knew the product was broken but they didn't have a sense of urgency until they were "punished".
When we were asked to move to Android or the team moved to internal messaging, it was not a punishment, but a chance to open our eyes to seeing the world in a different way. Often we know there is friction for a user, but until you feel it viscerally, it is hard to quantify or articulate.
Product choices are not binary. There are many dimensions and ways to solve a problem. The most important input is whether or not you understand the problem from the user perspective so that you are addressing it proactively.