Why Did This SaaS Company Deliver Cupcakes?
Some months ago I wrote about an awesome example of “dogfooding”, using your own product, at Square headquarters where they have set up a coffee shop to accept payments through their own service and into which they push beta builds to test their product.
As a product manager I’ve always thought that you absolutely must be a user of your own product in the consumer world, but was really impressed by seeing this done in a creative way in the b2b space and since then have always looked for an chance to do the same.
Since writing that post I have joined Revinate and while working on a new product which lets hotels better connect with their guests (b2b2c) I constantly looked for opportunities to try this out within our company. After a few months of work the product was ready for a public launch and along with our Marketing team I started thinking about how to get everyone in the office even more excited for this important event.
Press release was all ready to go, the revinate.com site was redesigned and we were talking about what to do for launch at the office. Balloons, decorations and treats were discussed, and then it hit us — why don’t we make our app a part of this launch experience?
Of course our Marketing team being the pros they are filmed the whole thing…
Basically we ended up emulating a guest-hotel relationship by having our team in the office use the guest facing mobile application to order sweets and champagne while a few of us pretended to be hotel staff servicing their orders. It was a super fun and interesting experience for both groups and an opportunity for everyone to see our product in a different light, not through presentation slides and demos, but for that moment as true end users.
Along with everyones deeper understanding of our offering, we got some great feedback with a couple items actually making it onto the backlog as future feature enhancements.
How can you do this?
As I said in my last post, I’m totally convinced that anyone can do this, no matter what service they provide. It simply takes a little bit of creativity.
What might be helpful, is using the standard persona development process where you start with some core questions about your audience.
A lot of us are developing solutions to problems and we at times forget just how complex and different our end users are. They live in a variety of environments, have diverse goals with constantly changing emotional states and desires. All of these things can be used to create a unique snapshot, draw similarities and place yourself into your users shoes.
For those of you who are building products which you don’t frequently use, or maybe even never get to use, try to find a way to become the user. If you end up truly trying but not coming up with anything, email me and maybe we can try to find a way together. Even if you don’t end up dogfooding on a daily basis, you will realize just how invaluable seeing your product through the end users eyes really is.
