Live data from Hacker News

Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 226 posts

Re: Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?

#32
Dogfooding is one of the goals behind our monthly hackdays -- even if you're an engineer working on our billing system, I want you to get a chance to use the product and demo your solution to a use case that you find interesting. ( http://www.pagerduty.com )

As silly as the end result is, you need a decent understanding of the product to integrate it with SnapChat ( http://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/10/pagerduty-can-wake-you-up-... )

Re: Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?

#35
We use out product, JackDB[1], everyday both for analysis and to develop the product itself further. It's a database client entirely in your web browser and we use it to run queries to analyze stats, research database features, and just general querying.

If you have the luxury of working on a product you use yourself (anybody work on developer focused solutions probably falls in this category) then I highly recommend it. Daily use of a product shows you let's you really see what parts of our product are not quite "smooth".

Just don't go down that rabbit hole too far. The features you use and how you use them don't always align with everybody else. As an example, when we first got started with it, what we considered a "low barrier" for a new user to try it out was actually quite a leap. Seeing real users struggle with that let us solve it. In your own bubble you might not notice things like that.

[1]: http://www.jackdb.com/

Re: Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?

#36
https://debitoor.com

Using it for invoicing for my side hustles. I would love to use it more as that probably would mean I was making more money :). In any case; seeing your own product through the eyes of the user is extremely beneficial and something I would recommend to anyone.

Re: Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?

#38
post #2

This poll is so social local saas web. I'm building a wafer stepper. That's a machine that's used to make chips and LEDs. We're building the very first one of its kind now. I'm not sure what it'll sell for, but it's not something you typically get together on Kickstarter. I guess I'd be using it if I owned a semicon foundry or something.

Exactly.

The idea that you should "eat your own dogfood" doesn't make a lot of sense if the product is (to draw from my personal experience) an x-ray machine, mechanical respirator, semiconductor metrology tool or electron microscope.

Re: Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?

#39
http://sandsquid.com (electronic component purchasing)

I use at least once a week for the mass production of another project I'm working on. You simply can not compare the quality of insight you gain from using the product yourself (not mock usage, but real usage and that's an important distinction) to any other kind of external feedback. The biggest difference is when improving the UX, especially in terms of coherency.

Re: Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?

#40
I built a service that tracks new music releases because I got sick of missing things from the artists I was interested in (http://beathound.com - iTunes only for now) - it only emails you at most once a week, so I use it generally once a week.

As it has grown, it's been interesting to observe the parts of it that I work on a lot (the parts I use - I just today fixed a bug in something that I kept seeing in my weekly emails) vs. the parts that get neglected because I don't see them as often.

Post reply on HN