Dogfooding
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008There is a contest going on in my org. The contest is to come up with new innovative ideas, concepts. A suitable working prototype will do. The winning proposal will fetch lots of US dollars. I personally think there is too much of romanticism with all this tech product companies being innovative and creative and so on. You need not be the next Google to survive. Once your product is out, most of the times you can help yourself with open eyes and ears. While being the next Google is great, some basics are more important. For e.g using your own product in real life as much as possible.
If you are running an ‘arisi mandi’ you better cook your meal from the rice you sell. If you can’t, that speaks a lot about your rice. Same applies for software product as well.
As far as I have seen, very few employees use the product they develop and design even though they can. Nor do they use the competitor’s product. Nor do they read the feedback from real users - the email compilation of which is received every single day. Nor do they read the web to see what the people at large have to say about what our product. Most of the junta come to office and leave early so that they can take care of the family. They are very clear, for them the product is their family and children.
In this scenario, does it really help to come up with all these contests? If only all good prototypes had resulted in great products, everybody would’ve been a millionaire by now.
If we can use this product more often, and truly listen to what customers say, we have enough work to do for the next year or two. We have gunnybags of bugs to be fixed. Feature request initiatives can happen from the bottom. We can be working on real problems, whatever!
