How we dogfood at Northern Labs

What is dogfooding?

The term dogfooding comes from the phrase “eat your own dog food” — it is the practice of encouraging the people in an organization to use the company's products. Organizations that regularly practice dogfooding build the world’s strongest product teams.

To be an effective product manager, we must be the “voice of the customer.” This requires that product managers build a culture of empathy for the customer, and to advocate for customer needs within the organization. But in order to truly understand customer pain points and experience with the product, a product manager must also know intimately how customers use the product. So, what better way to do that than to have internal teams become customers ourselves, using the very products we are building??

A famous early example of dogfooding is this memo from Apple:

My own experience with dogfooding

I’ve been lucky to work at, invest in, and advise a few amazing product-led companies. As part of my decision-making process in determining whether to engage with any of these companies, the first step is to be a customer, and use the product (I typically do this before even taking the first meeting).

One example of this process was my previous role at Wonolo , a platform that matches frontline workers with jobs. I downloaded the Wonolo app, went through the background-check process, and set up my alerts to find a job on the platform. After I was set up within the app, I accepted a job within the Wonolo app to deliver and serve catering to a startup in downtown San Francisco.?

I felt firsthand the excitement that users felt when they were matched with their first job on the Wonolo platform, and the “wow moment” they would experience when they were paid immediately after completing the job. I also encountered a few bumps along this user experience, and identified areas for improvement — but the overall experience was so positive that it made me want to work on the product!??

By dogfooding the Wonolo product and customer experience, I was able to gain a clearer, more actionable picture of where the product was and where it could go. This gave me ways to more deeply engage in meaningful conversations during the interviewing process than is typical in initial discussions with a company.

I joined Wonolo because of how passionate the CEO is about improving the lives of blue-collar workers. This area is overlooked by most in Silicon Valley. Yong Kim lists his title as Chief Empathy Officer on LinkedIn and he embodies it in constantly driving empathy among the Wonolo team for the end users. Wonolo had a longstanding dogfooding practice already in place even before I started: every quarter, each employee was required to use the company’s product, go through the customer experience, and accept and complete a job through the platform. This exercise kept us grounded to the product. It gave us an opportunity to not only use the technology we created, but also allowed us to work hand in hand with actual Wonolo end users, and gather direct customer feedback to improve Wonolo’s products and services.?

How does this apply to B2B companies?

Dogfooding as a concept is easy enough if you’re at a B2C company. It can be more difficult when you’re creating B2B products since it’s difficult? to put your individual team members in the mindset of the businesses that are your target customers. But, there are creative ways to solve this.?

At Upsight , a mobile-focused analytics and marketing tools company, I dove in head first by creating a mobile app that would eventually be our first “customer” for new releases. We tested new products and features on this “customer.” I also made this test app part of our team’s daily workflow; this allowed most team members to interact with our products. Upsight team members were able view the data they generated on our analytics dashboards (which our customers relied upon), as well as experience firsthand how our marketing tools and other products looked like for the end users (our customers’ customers).

An added benefit was the first-party data and use cases this “customer” test app generated could be used in sales demos, which became extremely valuable as we launched new features. Other teams could also leverage this data to create documentation, product marketing materials, and upsell existing customers.?

Perhaps the more valuable side effect of building out a dogfooding process here was that it was a quick feedback loop to find and address bugs with each new feature launch. As a product and engineering leader, the empathy we gained from dogfooding the product was the most impactful thing I did in driving prioritization decisions.

What we do at Northern Labs

So, how can you apply the concept of dogfooding to a brand new organization that doesn’t have any publicly-launched products, in a nascent space with a small user base? Part of the execution strategy at Northern Labs is to hire incredibly talented people, who oftentimes have limited experience in the Web3 space as it’s an early technology.?

Therefore, we need a way to encourage team members to get immersed in the blockchain world. This includes setting up a wallet, interacting with NFTs, transferring? tokens, signing transactions, deploying contracts, etc.???

To do this, we created a Northern Labs swag store that transacts in a newly minted $NL token.? Some items rely on team members having a personalized NFT. This store solves a number of problems:

1. You can’t just dogfood for the sake of dogfooding. You need to solve a real problem, otherwise people won’t continue to use it long-term. When new team members start at Northern Labs, we send them a welcome package, which contains branded merch. As more people joined and we started offering a larger variety of items, tracking who wanted what, what sizes they wanted, and where they wanted it shipped became tedious. Yes, we could have solved it with a spreadsheet and a form, but where’s the fun in that?
2. Many of our team members had never set up a crypto wallet. This provides the incentive for everyone to set one up and a low risk place to experiment with it. Now everyone at the organization will have a crypto wallet set up within their first week, will have interacted with a dapp and will have signed a transaction.
3. At Northern Labs, we are working on a number of stealth projects. These projects are at the intersection of fintech and Web3. As a result, this store now provides us with a product that will be a test bed to dogfood as more of our projects become available.
4. We wanted a way to reward our teams. When our teams go over and above to engage with the organization, such as presenting content at our Beer-and-Learns, getting voted as Team MVP, or winning monthly team-building games, etc., we wanted a way to distribute swag in a fair way. Encapsulating this all in the $NL token allows us to dogfood another Web3 concept of tokenomics. We have sources and sinks that will change over time, making it a fun way to learn!

Get your Web3 experience here!

This is just the beginning of the dogfooding adventure at Northern Labs .

Because we work with some of the most innovative companies at the forefront of blockchain and Web3 technologies, there are and will be many opportunities at Northern Labs to be the first “customers” in this space, and to dogfood the most leading-edge products and services currently in production for this new space. It’s an exciting time to build — and to learn!

If you’re a creative problem solver who wants to tackle new technical challenges, join us! Don't see your role? DM me your resume and tell us why you’d be a good fit.

In the meantime, check back here for updates and lessons learned on our projects that we’ll continue to dogfood!