“Dogfooding” is short hand for “eating your own dog food,” a term that is used by software companies to illustrate that they use as well as make their own software.

Microsoft and Google are probably the two most accessible examples of what this can mean for R&D. Microsoft became known for using their own Office product, a staple piece in almost every business and government workplace. Similarly, Google developers not only work on their core offering, but are also allotted a full 20% of their working hours to create pet projects, a brilliant idea that has lead to the creation of both Google News and Google’s social media platform Orkut.

It’s a proven model, so it should be no surprise that the developers at Grip also dine on our own kibble. When building the nomination site for the Oranges (Grip’s internal award program), the developers were able to integrate a different kind of authentication process and troubleshoot a solution for a nagging server issue. Most recently, Grip’s president, Harvey Carroll, moderated a battle of the business plans, allowing for voting via SMS and a mobile microsite with live voting results. At the end of this process, Harvey was able to use his phone to instantly name the winning team – as well as send a text alert to two random voters, informing them that they had also won prizes.

These are only a couple examples, but they lead to bigger conclusions. Here are a few other thoughts on how eating one’s own dog food can help improve overall product.

It forces developers and designers to be empathetic with their end user. It always scares me a little to hear designers question the validity of the user experience on their own projects. If the originator of the design can’t figure out how to perform a menial task how can we expect the end user to do so? It’s not enough to whip through an application to patch holes, you have to be a part of its active life.

You get user feedback for free and much quicker than you would in the wild. Consider how much faster it is to talk through an issue with a team member than a focus group. Going back to the Google example, you can see how that company uses its own resource pool to see if new features will work before spending money on promotion. They are a focus group – but of experts.

Finally, security of the project is increased. When you feed your dog food to a population with experience as vast as you do in an agency environment, unforeseen secondary uses rise to the surface. The combination of technical and non-technical people using your product reveals a gamut of interactions that may accidentally uncover a security flaw, before someone with less-than-ideal intentions gets to it.