Dogfooding — using your own company’s product for real, everyday internal work, not just testing it in a lab — actually relying on it the way a real customer would.
“The whole engineering team dogfoods the app every day before it ships to anyone else.”
Origin: Traces back to 1970s Alpo dog food commercials, where the pitchman said he fed it to his own dogs. The tech-world usage comes from a 1988 Microsoft email titled “Eating our own Dogfood,” sent by manager Paul Maritz to challenge a colleague into using the company’s own software internally — the practice stuck, right down to an internal server literally named \\dogfood.