Many teams aim to build great products but often move on too quickly or lose sight of experiences created months or years ago. To truly understand your product, it’s essential to step into your customers’ shoes and experience it firsthand. This is where dogfooding becomes invaluable.
Dogfooding is when companies use their own products to test, improve, and experience them firsthand as customers would. It helps identify pain points, usability issues, and bugs, fostering empathy for users and enhancing product quality. By simulating real-world usage, teams gain deeper insights, drive better decision-making, and create customer-centric solutions. The practice supports continuous product refinement, aligning internal development efforts with actual user needs.
While dogfooding continuously is important, we can also amplify such dogfooding efforts through a Product Immersion Workshop.
This hands-on practice allows teams to dogfood their own products, explore and experience their products like customers do, uncovering hidden friction points, usability issues, and overlooked opportunities. The goal? Build empathy, enhance product quality, and ensure the product continues evolving to meet real-world needs.
Benefits of a Product Immersion Workshop
Building Empathy: By using your product, teams better understand customer frustrations and uncover actionable insights. A messaging tool team, for example, moved off Slack to fully use their own product—leading to immediate improvements as they experienced gaps firsthand.
Revealing Hidden Friction Points: When you're too familiar with a product, you can overlook critical pain points. Immersion sessions expose those blind spots, helping teams address blockers before they impact customers.
Gaining Fresh Perspectives: Stepping into the user’s mindset highlights opportunities to simplify onboarding and streamline workflows.
Strengthening Collaboration: Cross-functional teams—design, engineering, product management, and support—come together to address challenges with a shared understanding.
Running an Effective Product Immersion Workshop
1. Define User Flow Assignments
Allow participants to try specific customer journeys, such as:
Onboarding
Checkout processes
Navigating key features
Resolving common issues
Encourage exploration to mimic customer behavior and identify friction.
2. Methodically Document Observations
Capture insights using categories like issue type, severity, and proposed fixes, supported by screenshots or recordings.
Issue Type: Bug, UX challenge, or feature request
Description: Steps to reproduce the issue
Severity: Critical, moderate, or minor
Suggested Fix: If possible
Visual Evidence: Include screenshots or recordings
3. Categorize and Prioritize Issues
Organize findings as:
Bugs: Immediate fixes required
UX Challenges: Navigation or interaction pain points
Feature Gaps: Missing functionalities that users need
Rank by impact on user experience and business outcomes.
4. Review and Prioritize Collaboratively
Discuss issue severity and customer impact with cross-functional teams. Align on short-term fixes and longer-term improvements.
5. Develop and Assign Action Plans
Assign owners for each fix, set realistic timelines, and track progress through ongoing workshops.
Incorporating Workshop Insights into a Friction Log
A friction log captures user pain points and helps prioritize solutions. Route the documented results from the Product Immersion workshop into a friction log that become a backlog for teams to address.
The Product Immersion Workshop fuels meaningful change by revealing insights and driving continuous improvement. It keeps customers at the heart of innovation, fostering a product that resonates with users and supports long-term success.