Dog Food and Cat Food

Use your own product obsessively (dog food) and competitors' products regularly (cat food)

Ebi Atawodi
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)

Dog Food and Cat Food

"Empathize comes very easily if you dog food and then cat food. Dog food meaning using your own product - absolutely a must. Cat food - using your competitors or other people in the landscape's products." - Ebi Atawodi

What It Is

A dual practice for PMs to build empathy and product intuition. "Dog fooding" (eating your own dog food) means using your product as a real user would. "Cat fooding" extends this to systematically using competitor and adjacent products to understand the broader landscape.

The practice builds the product sense that distinguishes great PMs - the intuition that comes from deep exposure to how products work.

How It Works

Dog Fooding

Use your own product as if you were a real user, not an insider:

Create Fresh Accounts: Don't just use your employee account. Create new accounts to experience onboarding, first-use flows, and the new user journey.

Use Multiple Personas: Ebi maintains "multiple variations of accounts on YouTube" to see how the product manifests for different user types.

Go Through Key Flows: Even if you're not the onboarding PM, go through the onboarding flow. Experience what users experience.

Use It Daily: If possible, make the product part of your daily life. Understand both the delight and the friction.

Cat Fooding

Systematically use competitor and adjacent products:

Direct Competitors: Use the products you're competing against. At Uber, this meant using other ride-sharing and payment apps.

Adjacent Products: Look at products solving similar problems in different categories. What do you love about Spotify's discovery? What makes Stripe's onboarding smooth?

Best-in-Class Examples: Every time you pick up your phone, notice what you love about your favorite apps. Articulate why.

How to Apply It

Weekly Dog Fooding Practice

  1. Set up test accounts - Create 2-3 accounts with different personas
  2. Schedule regular sessions - Block 30 minutes weekly to use your product fresh
  3. Document friction - Keep notes on what's confusing, slow, or broken
  4. Try edge cases - What happens when things go wrong?
  5. Compare to memory - Is the experience better or worse than last month?

Monthly Cat Fooding Practice

  1. Maintain competitor accounts - Keep active accounts on 3-5 competitor products
  2. Try new features - When competitors launch, try it yourself
  3. Note what you love - What are they doing better than you?
  4. Analyze patterns - What conventions are emerging across the industry?
  5. Share learnings - Bring insights to your team

Building Product Intuition

The goal isn't just to find bugs or feature gaps. It's to build intuition:

"Your researcher, if you think about the product cycle, research is ahead. But you're a human. Look at the products. Would you use that? You've built some intuition from just exposing yourself to really good products."

Ask yourself:

  • What is it about this app that I love?
  • Why did that interaction feel delightful?
  • What would I do differently?

When to Use It

  • Continuously - this should be an ongoing practice, not a one-time exercise
  • Before creating "Top 10 Things You Should Know" documents
  • During the empathize phase of vision development
  • When preparing for competitive discussions
  • When onboarding to a new product or company
  • Before making major product decisions

The Product Sense Connection

This practice connects directly to one of the four pillars of PM skills:

"When you think about the qualities of a product manager - product sense, leadership, execution promise, and technical ability - it's not product logic. It's product sense. It's a feeling. It's a sense of what is right, and the exposure to products and the curiosity will refine that sense over time."

Dog fooding and cat fooding are how you refine that sense.

Common Mistakes

  1. Only using your employee account - You miss the new user experience
  2. Skipping competitor products - "I don't have time" means you don't understand the landscape
  3. Not documenting - Insights fade if you don't capture them
  4. Treating it as optional - This is core PM work, not extra credit
  5. Not sharing learnings - Your insights should inform the whole team

Source

  • Guest: Ebi Atawodi
  • Episode: "Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)"
  • Key Discussion: (00:31:36) - Dog food and cat food for empathy
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

Related Frameworks

  • Walk the Store - Similar philosophy of direct product engagement
  • Friction Logging - Complementary documentation practice
  • Top 10 Things You Should Know - Where insights from this practice go
  • Empathize-Create-Evangelize - This is part of the empathize phase
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