We Need to Get Better at Dogfooding

We need to get better at dogfooding.

Dogfooding is a software idea: you use your own product the way a customer would, and you feel what’s broken before they do.

Healthcare gives us plenty of chances to see our work from the other side. We get sick. Our parents and partners and kids end up in the beds we round on, and we see our own hospitals from the other side. The admitting team and a specialty team give two different stories about what happens next. An NG tube is aimed straight up the nose. A family member is in pain, thirsty, with no urine output, and no one connects those dots until morning.

These are the kinds of signals dogfooding is built to catch. Reporting them is harder.

We’re family, advocating for someone we love. We’re also clinicians. We know how hard the people in that room are working, and we may feel a pull to protect them and our organization. Pushing for our loved one may feel like we’re working against the people we stand beside. We worry that speaking up might hurt the care or the relationships more than it helps.

The loyalty that makes us good colleagues is the same loyalty that keeps these experiences from being captured.

I’ve lived both sides of that choice. I’ve stayed quiet and carried the guilt, sadness, and anger. I’ve spoken up, been dismissed, damaged a relationship I depended on, and watched care suffer anyway.

Leaders need to make these stories safe to tell and useful once told. Clinicians who become patients or advocates see the system from both sides. They know it, depend on it, and are invested in making it better.

A bug report is useless if no one feels safe filing it.