Dogfooding is an experiment, not a mandate

All of the best products had brutal amounts of dogfooding.

Slack. Kubernetes. Cloudflare.

But a mistake teams make is treating dogfooding like a compliance ritual, something everyone has to do.

That’s when it stops teaching you anything.

Dogfooding is an experiment, not a mandate.

The real question is: if people could easily leave, would they still choose your product?

At Gojek, when I ran ML platforms, we never forced adoption. Teams could use GCP’s stack or OSS alternatives, whatever they liked.

The platform still processed billions of predictions a month.

Because it was better. Not because it was ours.

At my current startup, we recreate that same pressure.

Every engineer has access to multiple agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI, and they switch whenever our own agent falls short.

That’s how we learn what actually works.

If your team can’t easily walk away, you’re not dogfooding.

You’re just eating your own marketing.

As we see dogfooding usage go up, it actually feels earned.

So if you want to learn fast, don’t put your thumb on the scale.