Sun, Jun 14, 2009 20:55 EDT

Eating your own dog food

Improve quality, credibility and awareness by having your products used by your staff

Topic: Applications

Current Rating: Comments: 0

So you've got a great suite of products. Your development and testing processes are humming along smoothly. The business guys are happy. What else can you do to keep ahead of the game? The answer is to eat your own dog food. What does this really mean and why would you go out of your way to do it?

Simply put, eating your own dog food means that your company should be doing its utmost to utilize the products that you've been fanatically developing, marketing and selling. This isn't always obvious - your software should be used internally by as many business functions as possible and in ways that may not be the primary function of the product.

At Exari we write web based document assembly software which is primarily used by banks, insurers, corporations and governments to produce agreements around complex business rules. Internally we use our products to produce customized installation guides, technical operation manuals, our own employment contracts, expense forms, maintenance and supports agreements and even various server configuration files.

The benefits of eating your own dog food are many and varied including:

Familiarity - people in your company will start using and getting more familiar with the products. Make it easy for them to share ideas and report bugs and you've got an extended testing and usability team.
Awareness - your staff will become aware of new features quickly as they're using it day to day. Everyone from the CFO to the receptionist should be able to use the product.
Confidence - everyone will be more comfortable talking about the product and extolling its features and benefits.
Credibility - you look more credible to prospective customers because you use the software yourself.

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