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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

When I worked at Google I got re-orged into the same division as pixel / android.

My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone for personal use, and I am pretty sure I saw an Apple Watch on my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple- I remember several internal sites would ask you to file a radar (bug report) on why you switched to chrome from safari if you opened them in chrome. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices after 5pm.

There is a lot of incredible talent in that team but I think Google needs a minor culture shift to compete with Apple here.

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Interacting with Googler's in the past I noticed the same thing but took it a different way.

Clearly there was no pressure to use the Google product so they used a wide diversity of devices and services, and I saw this as a healthy thing.

I think that for the rank and file, not needing to use the device is fine. But if you are a manager/product owner/etc (especially over teams in charge of said devices) then YOU specifically should have to use google devices like 24/7 as part of your job.

I think it's unhealthy for those in charge not to use the products they sell, especially when talking about consumer goods.

I think those directors, VPs and PMs should be mandated to use their own products. Okay to keep iPhone, but use Android as well, at least for their corp works. The product quality of Workspace and Chrome is debatable but it's not even remotely comparable to those niche market products because everyone must use it in their daily works. Why not for Android and their hardware products? Even FB did droidfooding long time ago...

I worked at FB when GearVR came out, and I was the only person on the floor who had an Android device to test it with (so I'm not sure the whole dogfooding thing worked very well there either).

If you don't want to use your own product, why should anyone else? Empathy and understanding for your users is what drives a great product.

Let's put it a different way. Are you as likely to see the same number of Pixel watches, while walking around the hallways in the Apple spaceship?

Back in the day Google gave phones and other hardware to the teams and I happily dogfooded it all. Filed bugs, the whole bit.

Then it stopped. And if I’m going to spend my own money, Google has to compete on features just like anyone else.

the argument isn't that all googlers should have to dogfood all google products. But people in charge of a product line should have to dogfood it.

If you aren't willing to dogfood the the product line you have ownership of and prefer to use other products, you shouldn't have ownership in it as you have no vested interest in really making it better.

There is always nuance.

I think if you work on a team for some product, it would be good to be a user of that product. Especially if you are at a high level driving product decisions.

I think if you don't work on a specific product it is good to have diversity. For example GMail developers should probably use a mix of OSes and web browsers. But most Android GMail app developers should probably be using Android GMail.

But of course you don't want to be blind to other players, copying good ideas is good. So you do want to regularly interact with the other options as well. But I don't think only using the third-party option is a good idea either. If you only use an Apple Watch you don't know how the Pixel Watch works and how it has different interaction patterns (which on its own is probably a good thing). Maybe the product leads of the Pixel watch should regularly alternate between their own product and other competitors.

Dogfooding is so important, but so is competitive awareness. There has to be a good balance, where enough people are using your own product to find (and document) all of its flaws, but enough people are using competitive products to see bigger picture gaps.

I think you would have to be living under a rock to not have competitive awareness of apple while living in silicon valley or another tech hub.

You can get all the awareness you need from using the competitors product as a daily driver for a couple weeks, instead of using it 24/7 and being totally unaware of the problems using your own product that only crop up after heavy use.

Not wanting to dog-food your own product is probably the hardest culture to change I can think of, I wouldn't call it minor by any stretch

If you don't even want to use your product, your customer probably doesn't either, because there's a really good chance it's a crap product.

You can dogfood all you want at Google and file all the bugs and feedback, if it doesn’t fit in the snide product managers narratives, nothing gets fixed.

There's something to be said for being familiar with the popular competition, but, yeah, I'd be disappointed if my teammates weren't dogfooding something like that.

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