When I worked at Basho, I realized how challenging it was to really understand the experience of using Riak (a distributed NoSQL database) when it was simply not useful to Basho itself.
We dogfooded it, certainly, but Riak is designed for massive data sets that we simply didn't have need of. So while we tested it, we had to rely heavily on our customers to know what use cases were working well and what weren't.
To help alleviate that problem, our developers were frequently engaged with the customer support team; I think it was fairly standard that new engineers would start out on customer support.
I really envied companies that could properly exercise their products internally.
We dogfooded it, certainly, but Riak is designed for massive data sets that we simply didn't have need of. So while we tested it, we had to rely heavily on our customers to know what use cases were working well and what weren't.
To help alleviate that problem, our developers were frequently engaged with the customer support team; I think it was fairly standard that new engineers would start out on customer support.
I really envied companies that could properly exercise their products internally.