How Proper “Dogfooding” Might Have Saved Facebook Home (2013)

This article first appeared on Fast Company, June 10, 2013.

Summary: There’s been a lot of buzz lately about development teams using their own software–known as “eating your own dogfood”–in order to cultivate empathy for their users. After all, if the team doesn’t use the app they’re building, then how can they ever improve the user experience, right? Wrong! Counterintuitively, dogfooding only works in certain scenarios: Here’s how to do it, as illustrated by Facebook Home.