Eating our own dog food
3 things we learned when we started dogfooding Medoo
We could actually eat our dog’s food because we feed her delicious human-grade meals, but that’s not what we mean this time. “Eating your own dog food” is a term for using your own products and services whilst you build them. In our experience, dogfooding is an immensely valuable activity that helps to stress-test your product.
Now that Medoo is maturing, we have become the very first active users of Medoo and we’re keen to share with you a few things we have learned from this process.
Prioritisation
We were able to catch a number of usability bugs and potential pain points from day one. In other words, we felt our customers’ future pains before they felt them! This helps us more easily prioritise things that need to be fixed, features that need to be improved and new features that need to be added.
Validation
We were able to validate some of our earliest assumptions: having a dedicated space to record and track (and very soon visualise) our coaching journeys meant that we felt compelled to note down insights as they came to us. We found that we couldn’t wait to discuss our insights with our coaches, whereas previously we often felt that we could have prepared better for our coaching sessions.
Noting down our insights in turn helped us deepen our coaching conversations even further. We were better equipped to have engaging coaching conversations, and found ourselves with more insightful questions and thoughts to discuss with our coaches.
Operationalisation
By becoming early active users of our product, we have been forced to consider operational maturity from the early stages. This helps us plan ahead to support our future customers better. For instance, it enabled us to experiment with how we do database migrations.
We see early promise in Medoo not only through our dogfooding, but also from usability test feedback with potential customers. And we’re only just getting started! We have a long and exciting road ahead of us to craft a product that is loved by our customers.
At Medoo, our mission is to help people design and live intentional lives. We seek to create a deep connection between coaches and their clients by bringing to life a purpose-built coaching companion tool.
If you are interested in participating in our usability tests, please reach out to us at hey@medoo.life, we would love to get in touch!