There's a well-known phrase in software: "eat your own dog food." Known as dogfooding, it means using the software you build in your own day-to-day work first.
There's no shorter path to truly understanding a product, seeing what's missing and feeling your customers' pain points first-hand. That's exactly what we do at oigoworks: we run customer support on oigodesk and internal and customer training on oigolms. In this article we share the most important lessons from running our company on our own software.
What is dogfooding ("eat your own dog food")?
Dogfooding is when a company uses its own product in its daily operations — like a real customer would — both before and after offering it to customers.
The goal is to catch problems that never show up in a test environment, under real workload, and to make product decisions from lived experience rather than assumptions.
How we use our products day to day
What matters isn't only how strong a product is on its own, but how it behaves inside a real workflow. Here's how ours runs.
Customer support: oigodesk
Support requests, user feedback and bug reports all land in oigodesk. Everything from email, live chat and messaging channels arrives in a single inbox, and our team handles customer communication from one place.
Development work: from request to task
Requests that need development become bug, feature request or task records inside oigodesk. Our engineering and design teams pull these into their plans, and replies to the customer go out from the same record. That way a request's whole journey — from "customer question" to "fix shipped" — is visible in one place.
Training and onboarding: oigolms
FAQs, how-to guides for new features and internal training material become lessons in oigolms. Both new-hire orientation and customer onboarding run from there.
What using our own software taught us
1. Finding bugs before customers do
A confusing screen or a button that misbehaves doesn't always show up in testing. But when your own team uses the system for hours every day, small user experience (UX) issues surface immediately. That let us ship dozens of improvements before a single customer complained.
2. Flows between products must be frictionless
Moving data between tools by hand is one of the biggest drains on productivity. Every minute we lost linking a support request to the related work showed us we needed to strengthen our APIs and linking mechanisms. Our products stay independent, but they can talk to each other over APIs — and after those improvements our cross-team workflow became noticeably faster.
3. Customer empathy turns into concrete fixes
Telling customers "we really understand you" is easy. Living their operational challenges inside our own software turned empathy into concrete solutions. Internal feedback from our support team and project managers became the most valuable input to our product roadmap.
A team that uses its own product every day fixes the problem before the customer ever reports it.
What's next
This experience showed us that our products should stay independent in their own industries, yet be able to feed each other when needed. Next, we're working on these automations:
- AI-assisted content conversion: generating oigolms training drafts from questions that keep repeating in oigodesk.
- Automatic assignment: routing support requests to the right person based on topic and team members' skills.
Frequently asked questions
What does dogfooding mean?
It comes from the phrase "eat your own dog food" and means a company uses the product it builds in its own daily work. The goal is to experience and fix problems before customers do.
Which of its products does oigoworks use internally?
We run customer support and development requests on oigodesk, and internal and customer training on oigolms.
Do I have to use oigoworks products together?
No. Each product works independently in its own industry. If you want, you can connect them to each other or to your own systems through APIs and integrations.
Can oigodesk track development tasks?
Yes. oigodesk records can be typed as support tickets, bugs, feature requests, tasks and approvals, and tracked by status, priority and assignee.
Conclusion
Being a user of your own software strengthens your belief in the product and forces you to be a perfectionist. What we learned with oigodesk and oigolms didn't just raise our own productivity — it raised the quality of the service we deliver to customers.