Discussion

Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts!

cainxinth: I’m the kind of person that just assumes customer service is going to be bad. I gird myself whenever I have to call a company and just deal with their gauntlet with patience, knowing the trick is to outlast them. It costs them money every time you call. I’ll often tell them I know that and assure them I will continue calling until the matter is resolved. It’s not fun, it’s just the way things sadly are.My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”

chromacity: I agree with the broader point, but I'm perplexed by the author talking about dogfooding as a "sacred practice in the tech industry" in the context of customer support. Among big tech companies, customer support is usually not considered a part of the product. If you work at Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, you sure as heck don't try to go through the non-existent consumer support channels to report a bug.

bix6: Yeah well economies of scale matters more than your sanity

emerongi: My farts always smell good to me.

MitchSaid: Some years back I was introduced to UK service consultancy Vanguard (and their "Vanguard Method"), essentially a systems thinking approach to improving service (not to be confused with the enormous US investment management company).In their world, "smelling your own farts" (ie. listening to and, more importantly, understanding what matters to your customers using normative learning methods) isn't primarily about empathy, it's about getting knowledge so you can understand how to intervene in your company as a system.Put that way, it's not a waste for decision-makers to listen to customer phonecalls, it's in fact the only way for them to gain the knowledge they need to understand what to do to improve their service (assuming that's their goal).

afarah1: Ah, so the minutes long wait hearing answering machine bs is a universal experience. I thought it was a local thing and limited to ISPs, utilities, and financials... When I can choose between competing companies, having a direct line to a human for customer support is at the top of my list. I'm happy with either chat or phone, I just don't want to go through a bot first.

treetalker: Case in point, may every book the author picks up be designed like his website.

mrweasel: Two stupid calls I've had:1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that.2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online.The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people.Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.

consp: The worst one I've had is that after waiting for about 10 minutes, it passed through to a person who pushed me through the another department, only to end up in the same preselect menu I started the call with but with another option selected which points me to a website where you must enter your question and get an email back with the request to call the service desk and select the option I took in the first place. The circle of help desk life. Kafka would be proud.This is likely due to them merging two help desks into one making the second part useless as they can no longer see the data they need and thus canceling it entirely since it didn't get the right metrics.Also turns out that calling the competitors help desk is more useful as they can actually see the thing I was interested in as it is shared between them (fiber connections work schedule when they start to dig, hint they weren't going to). Can't use the competitor since the connections are monopolies...

delichon: I'm trying to subscribe to a website, but I try three different forms of payment and all fail. I confirm that they are all working. So I look for their help number but there's nothing. Then I see their Discord channel. I spend a half hour fighting Discord to create an account, then I have to spend another half hour playing games and answering survey questions to be allowed to post on Discord. Finally I type in my problem on their bugs channel. Nothing happens. Nothing continues to happen for three days. Then somebody at the website posts some question to me about my problem ... but I don't find out for another month, because I'm long gone, and I only check back in to see if they ever responded.They just couldn't un-arse themselves enough to make sure that they could take their potential customers' money. Gee I wonder why so many online startups fail.

GuestFAUniverse: It's the same horse manure, when architectonauts and developers aren't responsible for the operation of their Goldberg-inventions. Another phrase that comes to mind is: no skin in the game.To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.

Aurornis: > There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer.One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires.In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.

xingped: Amusing you picked that quote to quote because your job description is a dead ringer for Amazon work culture.

ChrisMarshallNY: There was a famous Brown and Williamson phone message, from late last century: https://nypost.com/1999/09/23/smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-when-y...I actually have a recording of it (scratchy), but won't link it, because it's probably not worth it. It was a riot.

apexalpha: I work at a company that builds apps used by field engineers.I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security".I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps.I asked the architect and he says the issue is "with Apple", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such.I did however find out you CAN share a login with PWAs if you use Edge on Android.I asked the Intune Architect about this and they said the field engineers should just use Edge in stead of Chrome. I asked him why it wasn't the default and he said this wasn't possible.I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this.This issue was present since at least 11 months before I got there.

joemazerino: The age old problem. Customer service isn't supposed to be mind numbingly unfathomable, and responding to customers should be easy. Unfortunately, unless higher management engages (is that Bezos or Gates? I've heard both) things will get lost in the mix.

chanux: Whenever I have to call an IVR system for support it puts me in a blood rage 98 out of 100 times. This space is the ultimate dark pattern mine field.My common interactions were with banks and telco companies. Absolute trash.I'm pretty sure some systems allowed remembering the DTMF menu and press it while the voice recording played. But the recent systems I called did not allow this. It was like they intentionally made people wait to suffer the torture.People call these systems as a last resort (At least I do). It should be illegal to make them so bad.Also, I used to work with Telco side guys of these systems and they were very proud of these "capabilities".Sorry for the rant. I had to vent it out.

blfr: With a mass product we're all at the mercy of the bottom quantile or even vigintile. These are the people who need to hear about checking website, collecting basic information, etc.Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's phone number.

Twirrim: About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison.They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch.I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".

01HNNWZ0MV43FF: Maybe "moral hazard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

daneel_w: To me, "dogfooding" isn't using your own product out of loyalty or some nondescript principle, as the author suggests. It's specifically about using your own product during its development as a means of testing while it's in its worst phase - literally eating dog food for a while.

forinti: My dad used to joke that "[Citroen] 2CVs and farts, only the owner enjoys".

emerongi: Exactly. I like my own farts and I don't mind that everyone else thinks it stinks.I find the title not very well thought through, because smelling your own farts is unlikely to lead to change.

shevy-java: Customer service has different meanings. Personally I prefer good, simple and effective documentation. I hate having to use a phone to explain problems. It's ok to do it in person, but not my preferred way.> It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey.I kind of prefer companies that build products that never ever need anything. Not even warranty calls, because the thing just keeps on working.What I noticed in the last few years was that we are too dependent on google search. Now that it sucks, finding high quality information has become harder - and AI trend is further ruining this, as everyone just has the AI summarize stuff now, which does not always work either.

skeeter2020: In my last role (engineering side) the VP of Product objected to me using the phrase "eating your own dogfood" because it was "gross" and she always interjected and replaced it with "drink your own champagne". I countered (privately) that was a feature; it's supposed to be a little unappetizing because you're early, building empathy and getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!). I think the difference in perspective succinctly illustrates the schism between trying to understand the customer experience asap, and the data-driven, kpi crowd where - conveniently - you can't discover these issues until it's too late.

carefulfungi: Interesting. I prefer "champagne" as it clarifies the goal: to make something curated, crafted, and desired. I've never interpreted the dogfood v. champagne difference as anti-empathy somehow.

sgarland: I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point, especially when the C-suite is full of founders (or maybe that’s worse?). I can understand how people want to make their bosses happy, and that can cascade into constant bullshitting, but at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”The U.S. Nuclear Navy, for all of its many flaws, gets this right. Generally at least once a year, the head of Naval Reactors - a four-star Admiral - tours every vessel, which may include a brief underway period. During this tour, the Admiral will talk to the engine room watchstanders, with all senior leadership removed. They’ll ask how daily life is, what they find challenging or annoying, what they like, etc. There’s obviously a lot of self-filtering (though sometimes not - Navy Nukes are not known for their social graces) that occurs, and also what a junior watchstander finds annoying may just be a required part of the job, but some useful signal is gathered.Even outside of the nuclear program, one standout example was Admiral Zumwalt, who as Chief of Naval Operations implemented 70 different changes over his tenure as a direct result of talking to sailors, all of which were designed to improve quality of life, efficiency, or communication.

strix_varius: I've heard exactly the same response before and I shared your reaction.The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?

thevinter: Yes but isn't it a bit weird to be implying your customers are dogs?

herodotus: And lying: "Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed". Only once did I get what everyone should use instead: "Please listen carefully to be sure you make the right selection". (Lying is also normalized by "I have read and agree to ....". Maybe better would be: "By clicking this box, you are agreeing to our needlessly lengthy terms, whether or not you have read them."

caminante: Liars gonna lie.> I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.I've found that LLMs really democratize debate when issues like this arise!Can't guarantee you'll win, but you when someone bets you're not willing to RTFM to call their bluff-- Oh boy!

hluska: This is an odd level of aggression. Life is too short.

sauercrowd: This describes quite well the huge advantage small companies have vs big companies.(Motivated) people at small companies "care", and what I mean with that is they are responsible and can see a large enough portion of the customer experience that - if something is broken - they'll see the pain and try to address it.At a big company no one cares. They of course care about their job, but their job is such a small fraction of the overall customer experience, that seeing their work having an impact on their customer is exceptionally difficult.That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.

cbg0: > at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.

sgarland: Because if you’re in charge of an org, you should occasionally validate what you’re being told? Is this an uncommon belief or something?

edent: Did you, by any chance, hit the "Drunk UI" option on a previous visit?If so, click one of the other themes at the top.

antisthenes: The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm.It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.

apexalpha: I do!I border collied these people into a room and the issue is now fixed.The system still sucks but 2000 field engineers got 10 min of their days back.A few weeks later the Scrum Master of the PWA team gave an inspiring talk about it at a conference.Personally you couldn't torture out of me that my app was so bad for so long, but yeah.

piker: The thing about dogfooding is that you have to force it in many domains, and if you aren't careful it can push you towards solving issues your users don't actually have.We've found ourselves trying to find this balance on Tritium. It's a word processor for lawyers, so has a specific narrow domain that allows us to provide a differentiated experience from Word. But if we try to use it like Word, we end up wanting generalized features that don't fit that strategy. I wrote a little about what we've come up with here: https://tritium.legal/blog/eat.This is one of the compelling rationales for closed-source / commercial software in certain B2B SAAS domains. You just cannot adequately test the happy and sad paths from a QA perspective in FOSS unless it's (1) insanely successful or (2) a dev tool.

hluska: You border collied them? I’ve noticed a real turn towards aggressive disrespect in this community. It’s really gross and it doesn’t make you look smart. They’re humans have some respect and don’t be so toxic. You don’t have to dehumanize your coworkers. This is basic.

ornornor: I guess we’ve worked at different places.

schiffern: Exactly. That's the "smelling your own farts" part.

apexalpha: 'corralled' better for you?And yeah I did that. It wasn't even my app. Or my team. Or my field engineers.I was just fucking ashamed of our entire IT department and thus took it upon me to fix this.It was the first time the PM had ever spoken to a field engineer.

weedhopper: Interesting, I wouldn’t think it matters that much though. If the phrase eating dogfood is unappetising to some when why not use the champagne analogy.

reverence23: > "eating your own dogfood" because it was "grossInteresting perspective. I watch a YouTube channel of a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog, and even feeds his dog from the skillet where he cooked the meal. Many practical reasons for that but also the dog being the main tool in hunting and getting that food in the first place.

manarth: > "a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog" "Dogfood" is used to differentiate from "food", "steak", "meat", etc.The youtube channel you describe is showing a dog being fed stereotypical cooked "human" food, rather than a human eating "dog" food.

mcmcmc: [delayed]

testaccount28: in this analogy, it is OP who is the dog.

schiffern: "Eat your own dog-food and smell your own farts" is just crass enough that people will actually remember and retell it. Nice work by the author's Comparative Memetics Division."Eat your own dog food" == experience your own product."Smell your own farts" == experience your entire product, including things that are typically unmentionables like customer service and billing

derriz: The phrase is striking but doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.Companies make dogfood and sell it and expect others (dogs, who aren't known for verbalizing dissatisfaction with their food) to consume it. The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.But I can't imaging a business which involves collecting farts and selling them to others and where sniffing a small quantity of each bottled fart would help improve production processes to ensure a better experience for the customer. And most people are appalled at the smell of others' farts but can tolerate their own, so the "smell your own" test wouldn't really tell you anything.

whamlastxmas: I think the metaphor is less about what you sell and more about the bullshit your customers have to endure to use the product you provide

riversflow: Life is too short for liars.

Jeff_Brown: Dogfoodung usefully connotes getting off your high horse, getting dirty, getting your face in it. I think it's perfect.

apexalpha: At my org the CIO knows fuck all about computers. Great guy on a personal level but wouldn't be able to quit Vim even if the lives of his 3 kids depended on it.He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them."Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.

Quarrelsome: tbf quitting vim is extremely unintuitive to someone that opened it by accident for the first time.

nocman: There's absolutely nothing wrong with the word picture that was used. I'd advise against assuming the worst possible interpretation of someone else's words (especially online). Most of us probably do that at least sometimes (present company included), but it would be much better to give people the benefit of the doubt. In this case, I think it is fair to assume that the original poster was just saying that he wouldn't let them try to get away and not actually deal with the problem -- much as a border collie prevents other animals from straying from the group, keeping them where they need to be.There is no need to assume that they meant that the others in the meeting were less important or less intelligent, or whatever. They were, perhaps, just less interested in dealing with the problem.

Quarrelsome: its extremely hard if you're being lied to when your org is so vast that trusting delegated responsible individuals is the realistic way of managing it. Also its probably not going to factor into your bonus.

caaqil: The author should consider smelling his own perfume, given the state and design of the site where he delivers his musings and gives us the moral lecture on not making the lives of one's customers miserable (without a hint of irony).

assimpleaspossi: The story is told in the recent book about Bezos and Amazon. The one by Brad Stone.

nocman: Yeah, I've never really been at all offended by the "eating your own dogfood" phrase, because I always saw that as being the point also.I must admit, however, that the title of this article was too crass for me. I came very close to not reading it at all just because of the title. In my opinion, the article would be better served by something else, but I'm just not a big fan of bathroom humor in general.

Quarrelsome: because you lose the meaning over time. George Carlin's famous piece on it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY

anal_reactor: Surprisingly, it is. If you find a problem then the value of your shares drops.

marssaxman: I used `killall vi` from another terminal for years before I finally memorized the proper way to do it.

reverence23: Thank you for clarifying, English is not my native language. In the end I guess different dogs get different quality food.

speff: From my understanding, it's generally for health purposes (though the convenience doesn't hurt). An example my vet provided is that the level of sodium consumption needed by humans is way too high for dogs.

Ylpertnodi: There was a BBC early-morning breakfast tv slot in which a dog was presented as 'vegetarian', until test time...the dog (given free choice between two bowls of food placed on the studio floor) went immmediiately for the meat dish.

Frannky: I know a person. Ex-Googly. Doing his startup. Spent one year on a crazy complex product. Investors do not get it. Users do not get it. He spends 99% of the time explaining why his ideas are so good. You ask to try the product, weeks pass and just slides and video demos. When you eventually try it, it's so confusing and nothing really works. I tried to make him understand that the constraint he needs to fit is users being able to understand rapidly why it's useful to them and that it should work. He does not care. He says it's about the story, and that the story will drive millions unlocking a super big team building his idea. I said that's cool but why in the meantime you don't just go with one thing that is useful and works and then procedurally evolve to your vision while you interact with the user and discover more about their problems. The answer was a one-hour speech on Google leveling system. Maybe he is right. Time will tell.

miltonlost: How do you get to be a VP while simultaneously being that delicate? My god, eating dogfood as gross is so childish to object to.

voidfunc: Our customers are morons for using our products and dogs are personable but pretty stupid so yea, makes a lot of sense.