Dogfooding
/ˈdɒɡ.fuːd.ɪŋ/ · Noun · Verb · Hacker Culture · Origin: 1988
Definitions
The practice of a company using its own products internally before releasing them to customers. Derived from the aphorism 'eating your own dog food.'
In plain English: When a company uses its own product every day — if it's good enough to sell, it should be good enough for the people who made it.
Example: "If we won't dogfood our own analytics dashboard, why would we expect customers to pay for it?"
Effective dogfooding requires that employees use the product under realistic conditions — not a curated demo environment. Microsoft famously dogfoods Windows and Office internally; when builds are buggy, thousands of employees feel the pain immediately.
Example: 'We dogfooded the new mobile app for a month before launch. Found 23 bugs that our test suite missed, including one that drained battery in 2 hours.'
Source: effective practice
Etymology
- 1988
- Microsoft manager Paul Maritz emails about 'eating our own dogfood'
- 2000s
- Google becomes famous for extensive internal dogfooding of products
Origin Story
If you won't use your own product, why should anyone else?
The phrase "eating your own dog food" means using your own products internally before asking customers to use them. The most cited origin is a 1988 email from **Paul Maritz** to Microsoft manager Brian Valentine, with the subject line: "Eating our own Dogfood." Maritz was urging the company to use its own products for internal operations.
However, the concept may be older. Some trace it to 1970s Alpo dog food commercials where the company president claimed to feed Alpo to his own dogs. Others point to Lorne Greene's 1980s Alpo ads with the same premise. Regardless of the exact origin, the idea resonated: if a product is good enough to sell, it should be good enough for its creators.
At Microsoft, dogfooding became a formal practice. Internal teams would run pre-release Windows builds as their daily operating system, reporting bugs before customers encountered them. Apple, Google, and most major tech companies adopted similar practices. The term has been shortened to just **dogfooding** and is universally understood in the industry.
Coined by: Paul Maritz (Microsoft email, 1988)
Context: Microsoft, 1988
Fun fact: Some companies find 'eating dog food' too unappetizing as a metaphor and prefer 'drinking your own champagne' (or 'champagning'). Apple allegedly uses 'dogfooding' internally but has never used the term publicly.