The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 4. Experiencing Your Own Product

[T]he designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual...If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

Donald Knuth

Many of us struggle to track down and engage beta users.

Suppose you’re preparing to launch a new version of your product, and you’d like to get it in front of users to test it out. Your product doesn’t yet have significant scale and an avid set of beta users who can be counted on to exercise a pre-release product on short notice. Most users have other priorities to accomplish before trying out your release. Those that do try it may not use the riskiest parts of the design. You’ve got deadlines, so you are tempted to ship something unvalidated by users.

As it turns out, there are users that are easier to engage—yourself, your teammates, and others at your company. These people share in the success of your product and are pre-incentivized to help you out.

Tip

Be your own first customer. This will validate your product early, cheaply, and harmlessly.

When team members use their own product, this is called dogfooding, a term popularized within Microsoft in the 1990s as it developed a culture of using the latest versions of its operating systems and compilers, coming from the phrase ...