Emerge Inc. Blog

Have you ever heard the term “Dogfooding”? Or the phrase, “ABC Company eats its own dog food”?

From Wikipedia:

To say that a company “eats its own dog food” means that it uses the products that it makes. “Dogfooding” is a means of conveying the company’s confidence in its own products.

The phrase originates from old Alpo dog food commercials where the commentator would mention that the dog food is so good that he feeds it to his own dogs.

As we develop web-based applications for clients, we make a concerted effort to use those tools ourselves.

One example is an employee human resource system that was created for a client. The web-based applications enables employees to complete timesheets online, request time off and view their available vacation and sick time. It also enables the company’s management to approve leave requests, view complete histories of every employees timesheets and generate reports.

Shortly after this was launched for the client, we implemented it for Emerge. The application was developed with enough flexibility to accommodate Emerge business policies which were somewhat different than the clients.

The main reason we “eat our own dog food” at Emerge is so we become intimately familiar with the experience of using applications that we develop. We are able to “see” the application from the eyes of a user and not just a developer. Working with our own software everyday provides us an opportunity to think through enhancements and improvements.

At the beginning of summer, I started sending a weekly email to all Emerge team members. We are growing at a nice pace and with 10 people in 2 offices, I wanted to be sure everyone was brought up to speed on important issues, items and projects.

Following is an excerpt from one of those emails:

I wanted to let everyone know that this is a critical week in the continued growth of Emerge. In addition to our normal work, we have a large number of big projects with deadlines quickly approaching.

This is time to show Emerge’s capabilities. If I was a sports coach, the pregame speech would go something like:

This is the opportunity for each person to step up, to demonstrate his or her skills. This is what we work for. These are real projects, for real clients, and will be used by many thousands of people. This is the time to be very focused, to complete tasks as quickly as possible, to avoid errors. Each individual’s actions this week will speak very loudly.

That said, these projects are too important and too big for individual effort alone. This is the time to work as a team, to communicate. To offer to help - but, don’t just call for the ball, show that you can make the shot. To ask for help - we need to utilize all of the talents of Emerge team members. Our actions as a team this week will speak loudly.

Let’s work together. Let’s work smart. Let’s stay focused. Let’s step up. And, let’s have some fun. Yes, there is a lot of work to be done, but we also have a very talented team. If we work together, we will have a lot to be proud of at the end of the week.

A little over the top? Probably, but the main points are true. The work we do this week will decide if we meet these important deadlines. And, meeting these deadlines will have a large impact on the next phase of growth at Emerge.

What followed was an extremly exciting week. I am proud to say that the Emerge team really stepped up. We accomplished an amazing amount of quality work in a very short time span.