dogfooding

Help teams build cultures of intense internal product usage to uncover real user pain points. Focuses on two core practices: requiring all team members to become active users of their own product, and using it intensely every day for real work rather than demo testing Provides a four-step implementation framework: assess current usage levels, identify gaps in firsthand experience, design systems that make dogfooding natural and required, and measure impact on product decisions Flags five common mistakes including superficial testing, delegating to QA instead of requiring team-wide usage, and ignoring edge cases beyond the happy path Includes diagnostic questions to help teams understand adoption barriers and connect dogfooding insights to product improvements

INSTALLATION
npx skills add https://github.com/refoundai/lenny-skills --skill dogfooding
Run in your project or agent environment. Adjust flags if your CLI version differs.

SKILL.md

$2a

Use the tool intensely every day

Michael Truell: "From the very start, our product development process was really about dogfooding, and using the tool intensely every day. And we never wanted to ship anything that wasn't useful to us." 'Intense' daily use provides the realism needed to build useful features, especially for AI products.

Questions to Help Users

  • "How often does each team member actually use the product as a real user?"
  • "What's preventing your team from being heavy users of your own product?"
  • "What would it take to make internal usage feel natural rather than forced?"
  • "Are you learning different things from dogfooding vs. customer feedback?"
  • "How quickly do you feel the pain of bugs or friction when using your own product?"

Common Mistakes to Flag

  • Superficial testing - Using the product only in demo mode, not for real work
  • Delegating to QA - Relying on testers instead of requiring team members to be real users
  • Ignoring non-obvious use cases - Only testing the happy path rather than edge cases
  • Not acting on findings - Dogfooding without a process to fix discovered issues
  • Excluding non-product roles - Only having engineers dogfood when designers and PMs should too

Deep Dive

For all 2 insights from 2 guests, see references/guest-insights.md

Related Skills

  • Writing North Star Metrics
  • Defining Product Vision
  • Prioritizing Roadmap
  • Setting OKRs & Goals
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