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Using your own product in real work so you feel its flaws before your users do.
Short for 'eating your own dog food' — the team runs daily on the thing they're building, which surfaces friction no test suite catches and forces fast fixes. For agent builders it means actually shipping with your own harness, not just demoing it. Example: writing the app's deploy script using the AI coding tool you sell. If using it yourself is painful, that's your roadmap.
Plainly
Think of Dogfooding as the checklist that keeps the app open for real people. Using your own product in real work so you feel its flaws before your users do.
In practice
Use it when a change has to survive deploys, users, incidents, analytics, or billing reality. In practice, define the owner, input, output, and failure mode before you rely on it.