Another possible origin is the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings.

— Eating your own dog food on Wikipedia

In software circles dogfooding is usually encouraged — and for good reason. When companies force themselves to use their own products extensively it can have some great benefits. Since internal users visit even the darkest, most neglected corners of a product, bugs tend to be found and fixed much faster than waiting for reports from end users. Employees are also often the most critical users of their own products, so they are driven to make it better and will often have some fantastic ideas.

However, I’ve started to see a dangerous side effect of dogfooding that can sneak up and do huge damage to a product if we’re not careful. Here’s the problem. If we use our own products all the time we become such overly advanced users that we’re eventually unable to separate our own needs for the product from those of our target market.

Most users of our products don’t eat, sleep, and drink the ins and outs of the features we slave over every day. They dip in and out to buy something, or upload something, or quickly edit a photo. So in a really unfair and ironic turn of events, the more we use our own products the less we’re able to think like our users. It sucks, but it’s unfortunately the way it is.

We all repeat the mantra “I am not the user” to each other, but we tend to forget that the way to solve that particular problem is not to morph into advanced users, but to spend more time with actual users. It’s already so hard for us to put ourselves in the minds and shoes of our users. Dogfooding makes this even harder by lulling us into a false sense of security that maybe — just maybe — we are the user after all.

So, be careful. By all means use the crap out of your product — you wouldn’t be pouring your life into it if you didn’t love it. But once you start demanding features that would make your life easier, stop yourself. Be critical of your own motivations. Look at analytics and figure out if yours is a common use case or something reserved for the 1%. Contact your friendly neighborhood user researcher and ask them if they’ve validated the need for said feature. Hold on to your demand with open hands, and let it go if you realize it’s not something that would improve the product for target users.

In short, keep dogfooding — but don’t assume that all dogs will like the new flavors you’re proposing.