Product Management: Should You Eat Your Own Cooking?
- 3rd January 2013
Would you purchase a car from a BMW salesperson who drives a Honda? Would you eat at a restaurant where the chef doesn’t eat the restaurant’s food? There’s a common expression called “eating your own dog food,” meaning that you should use your own product or service. After all, if you don’t believe in what you’re selling, why should anyone else?
Before we go any further, I’d like to suggest we get away from the traditional “dog food” analogy, which has its own set of connotations (including some negative ones). Instead, let’s replace “dog food” with “your own cooking.” I’d also like to emphasize the distinction between “tasting your own cooking” and “eating your own cooking.” Chefs regularly taste their own cooking to determine if the recipe is right, but that’s different than eating the full dish for its nutritional value and sustenance.
Using your own product to replicate the customer experience and “tasting your own cooking” can be a valuable exercise. You will become your own subject matter expert concerning all of its features and functionality, which is helpful to be an effective product manager, marketer or salesperson. This can often be a good way to gain personal insight into potential pain points or enhancements.
That said, there are times when your own personal experience or perspective might be irrelevant or detrimental to the product. If you’re creating a product for neurosurgeons, or Hong Kong currency traders, or entry-level assembly line workers, your own perspective pales in comparison to what those buyers and users would provide. Your opinions on what would improve the product design and functionality might not agree with the perspective of the actual buyers and users.
Many companies are going beyond just “tasting their own cooking” and are “eating their own cooking” – using the products they create to actually run some aspect of their business. The thinking here is that “If it’s not good enough for us to use as part of our business, then it’s not good enough for our customers.”
The problem is that this strategy can backfire if your company’s needs are not similar to those of your customers. Plus, if TV cooking shows have taught us anything, it’s that what tastes good to one chef may not be palatable to someone else.
So, when does it make sense to taste your own cooking? When does it make sense to eat it? And when does it make sense to do neither? Tally up how many times you answer “yes” to the following questions:
- Are you in the target market for your products or services? Based on the criteria you have defined around ideal target markets (you have done a relative targeting and segmentation prioritization, right?), evaluate whether your organization fits within the vertical or horizontal markets you have chosen to prioritize. For example, you may have prioritized the insurance market as a target, or more specifically independent insurance brokers.
- Do you fit the profile of your ideal buyer? Within your target market, you should have a view of what the ideal customer looks like. Building on the above example, maybe your ideal buyer is an employee/operator that sells both auto and home insurance products and has no more than 10 employees. Analyze how closely you fit that buyer profile.
- Do your employees fit the profile of your typical user? Your typical users have certain demographic characteristics, domain knowledge and technical skills. Compare how closely your employees match that profile. Maybe for your product for independent insurance brokers, the typical users are administrative assistants, over 50 years old, with limited computer experience.
- Are your goals and needs consistent with those of your buyers and users? You should understand the needs of your buyers and the tasks that users of the product or service would be trying to accomplish. Match these to the way you would be using the product within your business.
If you answered “yes” to all four questions, then it may make sense to “eat your own cooking” and use your product within your own business. Feedback from your own use of your product can be a valuable input, alongside other market and customer feedback.
If you answered “yes” to two or three of the questions, then it may be worthwhile to “taste your own cooking” on a limited basis, but be extremely conscious of how buyers and users differ from your company. The more dissimilar your internal users are from your buyers and users, the less valuable internal use will be as a source of insight into how your products can be improved. Also, “eating your own cooking” might actually harm your business, since you didn’t design the product with your own needs in mind, nor should you have.
If you answered “yes” to zero or one of the questions, then “tasting your own cooking” and making decisions based on your perspective could be hazardous to the product’s health. In this situation, your needs are so dissimilar to the needs of buyers and users that your internal perspective on the product could at best be irrelevant and at worst could be the exact opposite of what is right for your customers.
About the Author
Jeff Lash is Research Director, Product Management, at SiriusDecisions. A recognized thought leader in product management, he has over 10 years of experience in product management, portfolio management, product development, and user/customer experience design. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jefflash.
Leave a Comment
4 Comments
Steve Johnson, 3rd January 2013 at 9:40 am
Product managers should definitely eat their own cooking when it’s possible. For example, I’ve heard that all Microsoft employees are part of the MS Office beta program. A HR software firm uses their own selection software for vetting internal candidates. If you’re not willing to use your own product, why would you expect customers to?
But what if you’re not the user of your product? In that case, you really need to spend time at customer sites. Luke Hohmann calls this “me and my shadow.” Sit next to the person who uses your product. You’ll be amazed at how they use it. And that they don’t know (and may not care) about the coolest features. Product and market are two areas I touch on in my ebook, Product Management Expertise, found at http://www.under10templates.com/writing/expert
By the way, the dog food analogy is actually appropriate–for a much different reason than is usually cited. It’s not about eating your dog’s food; it’s about realizing that the buyer and user have very different requirements. The buyer of dog food wants healthy selection. If we let dogs define their requirements, well, we wouldn’t like their recommendations. You need to understand the requirements of the buyer (or else they won’t buy) but you also need to understand the users (or else they won’t use it and won’t renew it).
And isn’t that what product management is all about? Understanding the market so we build products that buyers will buy and users will use. How? Use the product yourself if you can, and spend time with both users and buyers as often as possible.
Let’s make 2013 the year that product managers and product marketing managers become expert on the customers.
Geoff Anderson, 3rd January 2013 at 10:28 am
Good points, and quite relevant (and I am doubly glad you commented on the term “dog food”). Alas, far too often I have found myself in the category where we fit one of your three criteria, and relatively poorly. It is one thing to be an alpha tester to IP Telephony like I was at Cisco in the early 2000′s, but not all roles I have had were such natural fits to taste or eat the cooking.
My last gig was in the realm of Fax Servers, and we indeed ate the cooking, but as that was a market that was very mature, it wasn’t much risk, and indeed having pretty much defined the market 25 years earlier further reduced the risk.
Thinking of some obvious examples, I would bet that the folks at Pandora or Spotify are adamant users of their technology, as are dropbox and box.net. That is easy peasy. But get into medical devices, machining tools, and other B2B types, and the internal validation story becomes a lot less compelling.
Hence the importance of the old standby, product management/marketing doing voice of the customer, validation of feature prioritization and backlog, and (hopefully) having enough industry experts either on the payroll or as part of an advisory board.
Great reading! Thanks.
Abigail Plumb-Larrick, 8th January 2013 at 2:14 pm
This is really thoughtful, Jeff. I’d argue that eating your own home cooking is positive in order to understand a baseline customer experience, but that it can be a hindrance if you’re looking for vision. If you’re hitting friction with it, it’s certain that someone further removed is hitting more. Issues with client support, for example, or interface problems can emerge this way.
However, allowing your own experience to determine product direction or vision unduly can be a serious misstep. Even if you are the user, your sample size is still one. The chances that you fully embody the user persona for your product are vanishingly small, and I’ve personally seen (and narrowly avoided making) gross errors in judgment based on confusing personal requirements with market problems.
Jeff Lash, 9th January 2013 at 9:15 am
I’ve seen a trend lately of more and more companies — especially SaaS startups — “eating their cooking” as I call it and using their products as part of their business operations. That worries me because not only are they less likely to design a product which meets the needs of their target market, but they are likely to be using a product which is not designed for their own business and suffer from that.
It’s this second part that people don’t often think about.
Yes, we all know that you need to get close to your current/potential customers to understand their needs and design your product accordingly. However, when you start using that product within your own business (e.g. you create a software product for florists to manage their finances, and you use it to manage the finances of your software business), you risk doing damage to your own business as well because the product isn’t designed to YOUR needs. While it seems like heresy, sometimes it makes sense to use a different vendor — even a competitor, potentially — for use within your company if that product better meets your own business needs better than your own product does.