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

Nopes, I really hate it.

We just added a new page in our admin panel labelled 'dog food' and will be using that as a testing lab. The product we sell is a technology for sales teams and now that we are out selling ourselves we have a greater need for our own product.

Although the conventional wisdom is to build things you had a need for yourself, I believe this is one of the riskiest ways to create breakthrough innovations. Far easier to go find people who have a problem and who are not developers and get them to pay for something.

At my previous employer, a small browser vendor that decided to abandon its own rendering engine and browser stack, I stopped using our product because Linux wasn't a priority. Numerous reasons were given, such as low market share, “only geeks use it”, all journalists use Macs, &c.

This was to the point of ridiculing the platform and the people working on it, frequently citing “Linux jokes” such as “you'll probably have to recompile your kernel first” whenever the question was seriously raised about when we'd start at least getting the core libraries working.

And when I say it wasn't a priority, I mean that we didn't even have something that was in a compilable state. A few people had started fixing up the broken code to get something that would compile on Linux in their own free time. After a few weeks of hacking, they were told by management to stop what they were doing and instead focus their volunteer efforts on the project goals, being to ship a Windows and Mac version.

So the company began the process of forcefully moving developers who'd worked on Linux for over 15 years to platforms they felt uncomfortable and unproductive working on.

This is a much longer tale, but it tells the story of a company alienating not only their loyal user base, but also a significant proportion of their own developers. The result? Lack of motivation and resignations.

Well done.

The product I am working on is a commercial product (Legal Compliance Management) - not a side project. The product "could" be used by my company - but we don't.

In this case I probably should consider myself happy: I'm on the developer team of Collabtive, a free open source Basecamp alternative, i.e. a project management software.

In fact it is very easy to use our own product not only for project management in the strict sense of the term, but also for bug tracking, file storage and distribution and community management.

Besides it being useful for us, we have already been able to put a lot of our own requirements into the published version.