dogfooding
jargonops cultureprogramming
Using your own product internally, so its failures bite you before they bite customers.
The phrase's tech usage is commonly traced to 1980s Microsoft, where a manager's 'Eating our own Dogfood' email pushed teams onto their own unfinished server software. Dogfooding shortens the feedback loop no survey can: the builders feel the latency, hit the edge cases, and cannot close the ticket on themselves. Its known failure mode is monoculture, since a company of power users eats a diet no customer eats; dogfood accordingly, then still test with strangers.
Also known as: eat your own dog food