Full-featured employee accounts don't count as using your own product
Nan Yu says the goal is to feel bad the same way customers do. Charlie Marsh says caring is the moat. The comments break this down into concrete actions: 4% battery, 3G, an old Mac, canceling a subscription, calling your own company after hours. There's also a counter-warning: overdoing dogfooding turns into dog-barfing.
Lenny Rachitsky shared a clip from an interview. In the video, Nan Yu says his goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad.
Original tweet link: https://x.com/lennysan/status/2115603695467684168
This quote has context. Charlie Marsh previously wrote: Caring is the moat. When the system breaks or the experience is bad, you should feel it physically, and then you can't stop until you fix it. Original tweet link: https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/2114040855073820966
The problem is that product teams can easily turn empathy into a performance. Office gigabit internet, employee accounts with every feature unlocked, walking the same path every day, clicking through once and saying the experience is good. Someone in the comments says it directly: employee accounts with every feature unlocked don't count.
Eat your dog food, but don't make yourself dog-barf
Nan Yu coined a term in another tweet: Dog-barfing. It means dogfooding too hard, in ways completely disconnected from real customers. Original tweet link: https://x.com/thenanyu/status/2075532424272912728
Under that tweet, someone replied that the term sounds like a jab at the sales team. Nan Yu himself replied that he was talking about the sales team proposing to replace Hubspot every time and using Linear as a CRM. Product teams should laugh at this, then go quiet.
Put empathy into bad conditions
The comments offer many concrete actions, more useful than phrases like 'customer-centric.'
One person said: use your own app on 3G in Lagos with 4% battery. Another said: use the product like a brand-new customer; ten minutes beats a week of dashboards. Another said: use it on a tired evening, not during a demo. Small annoyances will surface; customers feel them but won't write feedback. Another said: using your own product at 2 a.m. is the real QA.
Someone suggested canceling your own subscription once. The cancellation flow shows how a company treats people who want to leave. Another said: the boss should call their own company once a week after hours. If the voicemail is full, that's the customer experience. Another said: slow Wi-Fi, full disk, old Mac—run through it under the worst customer conditions, and you can find real bugs in an afternoon.
One reply mentioned: one hour as a customer beats forty pages of personas. It's not a new saying, but next to these actions, it's very concrete.
The manager version is the same
Someone applied the same logic to management: sit in the meetings your team sits in, use the tools they complain about, read the reviews you write as if you were receiving them. Most bad feedback wouldn't go out if managers received it first.
Empathy only becomes useful when it turns into action. Eat your dog food, but don't make yourself dog-barf.
发布时间: 2026-10-29 15:31