My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”
To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.
1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that.
2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online.
The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people.
Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.
I actually have a recording of it (scratchy), but won't link it, because it's probably not worth it. It was a riot.
They just couldn't un-arse themselves enough to make sure that they could take their potential customers' money. Gee I wonder why so many online startups fail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224
a happy coincidence.
In their world, "smelling your own farts" (ie. listening to and, more importantly, understanding what matters to your customers using normative learning methods) isn't primarily about empathy, it's about getting knowledge so you can understand how to intervene in your company as a system.
Put that way, it's not a waste for decision-makers to listen to customer phonecalls, it's in fact the only way for them to gain the knowledge they need to understand what to do to improve their service (assuming that's their goal).
Then growth - excuse me, metastasis - came along.
Thanks to metastasis - excuse me, enshittification - we've outgrown dogfooding. We'd used it as a kind of UX gyroscope, something that works to keep us balanced without too much institutional thought or effort. It made us more efficient at competing. Now that the biggest firms are the least threatened by competition, why would they subject themselves to the indignities of the User?
One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires.
In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.
We've found ourselves trying to find this balance on Tritium. It's a word processor for lawyers, so has a specific narrow domain that allows us to provide a differentiated experience from Word. But if we try to use it like Word, we end up wanting generalized features that don't fit that strategy. I wrote a little about what we've come up with here: https://tritium.legal/blog/eat.
This is one of the compelling rationales for closed-source / commercial software in certain B2B SAAS domains. It seems like you just cannot adequately test the happy and sad paths from a QA perspective in FOSS unless it's (1) insanely successful or (2) a dev tool.
Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.
Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.
There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.
My common interactions were with banks and telco companies. Absolute trash.
I'm pretty sure some systems allowed remembering the DTMF menu and press it while the voice recording played. But the recent systems I called did not allow this. It was like they intentionally made people wait to suffer the torture.
People call these systems as a last resort (At least I do). It should be illegal to make them so bad.
Also, I used to work with Telco side guys of these systems and they were very proud of these "capabilities".
Sorry for the rant. I had to vent it out.
> It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey.
I kind of prefer companies that build products that never ever need anything. Not even warranty calls, because the thing just keeps on working.
What I noticed in the last few years was that we are too dependent on google search. Now that it sucks, finding high quality information has become harder - and AI trend is further ruining this, as everyone just has the AI summarize stuff now, which does not always work either.
"Eat your own dog food" == experience your own product.
"Smell your own farts" == experience your entire product, including things that are typically unmentionables like customer service and billing
(Motivated) people at small companies "care", and what I mean with that is they are responsible and can see a large enough portion of the customer experience that - if something is broken - they'll see the pain and try to address it.
At a big company no one cares. They of course care about their job, but their job is such a small fraction of the overall customer experience, that seeing their work having an impact on their customer is exceptionally difficult.
That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.
The other thing you can do is having senior leadership occasionally try the product themselves and talk directly to customers (especially ones that have problems).
Often, problems remain because of bureaucratic hurdles, or disputes between different fiefdoms: there's a feature that needs teams X and Y to improve, but it would only help the internal metrics for team X, so team Y doesn't give a shit and drags their feet. Leaders who are sufficiently high in the hierarchy can cut through these sorts of problems if they know and care.
Companies make dogfood and sell it and expect others (dogs, who aren't known for verbalizing dissatisfaction with their food) to consume it. The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.
But I can't imaging a business which involves collecting farts and selling them to others and where sniffing a small quantity of each bottled fart would help improve production processes to ensure a better experience for the customer. And most people are appalled at the smell of others' farts but can tolerate their own, so the "smell your own" test wouldn't really tell you anything.
Eating your own dogfood is laudable - sniffing your own farts is not.
Our software engineering team is burdened with tech debt and aggressive product roadmap. Understandably, they often feel the need to push back and keep things under control. Our customers and the employees who are accountable to our customers literally lose sleep when things aren't going well. Our engineering team feels complacent to function on a 9-5 schedule and sleep on critical issues for weeks.
The only thing the engineering team appears motivated to actually own is the next iteration of the escalation process that somehow makes them even less accountable. Invariably the next iteration includes adding more details to Jira tickets that nobody will read.
Basically no one on that team is dogfooding the product. Broken features are being shipped and they are expecting us to actually sell and support this.
Aside from the general policy on HN of not complaining about "tangential annoyances", I don't even see the issue.
The saying was - "if you're not eating your own dogfood, you're smoking your own dope."
Very basic idea: is your product good enough that you would use it / consume it for your own needs and purposes? No? Then you are deluding yourself if you think you have a good product.
Simple as that.
Attributed to a Microsoft exec in the 80s: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/eat-your-own-dog-food-how-micr...
In 2015, Marc Andreessen memorably said of Mixpanel's success at product-led growth: "The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-adva...
That then led to the idea of "eating your own dog food", because if even you won't eat it, what credibility do you have saying that the other dogs will?
The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
I must admit, however, that the title of this article was too crass for me. I came very close to not reading it at all just because of the title. In my opinion, the article would be better served by something else, but I'm just not a big fan of bathroom humor in general.
Didn't you just destroy your own argument? If dog food is expected to be more delicious to dogs than humans, how is eating it supposed to indicate anything about whether it's well-made for the dog? Shouldn't you have your dog eat it, rather than yourself?
So isn't your manager's alternative the one that actually makes sense?
Smelling Your Own Dog Farts would also be acceptable...
Solved it.
It's relevant to the central argument of the article, so I don't consider it a tangent (assuming that one even cares about the so-called policy).
Interesting perspective. I watch a YouTube channel of a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog, and even feeds his dog from the skillet where he cooked the meal. Many practical reasons for that but also the dog being the main tool in hunting and getting that food in the first place.
>The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.
You may think you don't need to eat your own dog food (just like the dog food companies), but actually you should still do it.
Without being able to cite a specific TV ad or other urban legend sort of baseline, it clearly communicated that you hold yourself and your products to a higher standard. As a dog-food producer, you don't just meet the minimum requirements for legal sales, but you make it well enough to be fit for human consumption too.
It's in the same category as someone demonstrating that they could safely drink or breathe byproducts of some other industrial process. And, ironically, there was also a widely understood corollary that we could expect PR types to do something like this while secretly fearing that it would actually harm them.
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website?0 And was I aware that I could manage my account online?1 And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp?2
Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that whoever was in charge of predicting call volumes had recent suffered a traumatic brain injury and was unable to count beyond five without pulling their other hand out of their fundament.
The cheerful woman warbled through her pre-recorded script and was suddenly replaced with a hideous electronic monstrosity. I recorded the call3 so that you can experience this monument to synthetic glory!
🔊
This is from a company whose website gushes about how innovative it is. AI is transforming its business at scale! Dedicated to technological excellence and delivering ISO accredited quality in all its divisions! And yet, somewhere, someone decided that customer experience was good enough.
"Dogfooding" is a sacred practice in the tech industry. Use your own products. That's it. That's all you have to do. For example, if you work for Slack - you can't use Teams for your messaging solution. You have to show people that you have faith in your own products.
But it goes deeper than that. When I used to work for mobile phone networks, they asked us to spend time in call centres. It isn't enough to receive a quarterly report on customer KPIs. You have to hear the rage in customers' voices as they struggle with your billing system. Perhaps that will convince you to have empathy with the people paying to use your product.
There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer. When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line?
It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey.
By contrast, I recently cancelled a subscription to a small start-up's service. Someone from their senior leadership team asked if they could call to chat about why I cancelled. I said sure and had an enjoyable half-hour whinge / chat about their failings. At almost every complaint, they replied either "Oh, yeah, I also find that annoying" or "Huh, I've not experienced that, but I can see why it would suck."
At no point did they ever say "Our metrics don't show a problem" or "Do people really care about that?"
Maybe I was being flattered. Maybe it's a waste of senior leadership time to start every meeting with a ritual phone call to the call centre. Maybe I'm the only one who gets annoyed when people can't be bothered to put the bare minimum effort into their job.
But, maybe, breathing in the noxious output of barely digested slurry is the only way to get people to improve their diet.
None of these are the goal.
The goal is to deliver value. The saying just means to sample your own product, with the implication being that you should be doing some form of quality management. It could just as easily be “play with your own widgets”.
Bougie-fying it to champagne destroys much of the meaning because it literally doesn’t matter what the product is, you should be sampling it no matter how distasteful or irrelevant to your personal interests. You would not have a hard time getting people to sample champagne for their job.
George Carlin's famous piece on it:
> "a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog"
The youtube channel you describe is showing a dog being fed stereotypical cooked "human" food, rather than a human eating "dog" food.
For a PM to assume that the product ever becomes champagne feels very naive.
Much commercial dog-food is made with ingredients which aren't fit to be consumed by humans.