Dogfooding as Product Discipline

Sources#

• How Anthropic's product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)
• Running an AI-native engineering org
• The ERP for the AI Revolution is here

Summary#

The cross-source claim that product sense is built, not innate — and the way you build it is relentless first-hand use of the thing you ship. Fiona Fung calls it "ant food" (Anthropic's term for dogfooding) and names it the answer engineers kept asking her for: how do you build the product-sense muscle? Use the product until you "feel it in your bones." The same discipline recurs as Cat Wu's lunchtime vibe-checks (Claude Character as Product) and John Glasgow's "I'm in every Slack channel with every customer" (Founder-Led Sales Discipline). When agents make generation cheap, taste is the scarce input — and dogfooding is its training regimen.

Why product sense becomes the scarce skill#

Once coding is cheap (Verification as the New Bottleneck), the constraint shifts to knowing what's worth building and whether it's any good — i.e., product taste. Fung's two engineering profiles she now hires for are "creative builders with product sense" and "deep system expertise." The first is the dogfooding-fed one. This is the org-level confirmation of Engineer PM Convergence and Evals as Product Spec: taste/judgment is the durable human skill as the harness shrinks.

Fung's mechanism: feel it in your bones#

Her recipe for building product sense:

1. Dogfood — especially for managers, who pre-Claude often had no time in the product. "You really start feeling your product in your bones; you remember what problem you were trying to solve." Without it, "you make product decisions based on metrics, dashboards, or PowerPoints."
2. Ship and iterate.
3. Talk to customers — her passion project is onboarding small-business friends (restaurateurs) onto Cowork and watching them struggle: "really humbling to see how many things we could be doing better" in onboarding. (Tied to Anthropic's Claude for Small Business.)

The Mr. Peanut story is the taste-calibration anecdote: she coded a holiday "snowman" Claude in the CLI; her designer said it looked nothing like a snowman — "you turned Claude into Mr. Peanut." Human product/design taste caught what the builder couldn't see — the kind of judgment the model lacks.

Claude as cross-functional gap-filler (the flip side)#

Dogfooding reveals where you're weak; Claude then fills those gaps across all roles: designers on Claude Code make polish/UX fixes themselves via Claude instead of red-lining and handing to engineering (closing the iteration loop); Fung, a self-described verbose engineer, used Claude as a "content design partner" for short copy. "Claude is augmenting all the areas where you may not be as strong." Dogfooding tells you where the gaps are; the tool helps you close them — but the taste to notice the gap stays human.

The three faces (cross-source)#

Source	The dogfooding move
Fiona Fung	"Ant food" — managers dogfood to keep product sense; onboard small businesses to feel onboarding pain
Cat Wu	Lunchtime vibe-checks of the model as eval discipline (Claude Character as Product)
John Glasgow	Founder in every customer Slack channel; joins sales calls to drive engineering (Founder-Led Sales Discipline)

All three treat direct, repeated, first-hand contact with the live product/customer as the non-negotiable source of taste.

Connections#

• Fiona Fung — "dog food, dog food, dog food… ant food"
• Cat Wu — lunchtime vibe-checks as the same discipline in eval form
• John Glasgow — founder-in-every-Slack-channel as the customer-contact version
• Claude Character as Product — vibe-checks; character quality is judged by dogfooding, not metrics
• Founder-Led Sales Discipline — staying close to the customer is dogfooding the sales surface
• Evals as Product Spec — evals encode taste; dogfooding is how you acquire the taste evals encode
• Engineer PM Convergence — "creative builders with product sense" is the dogfooding-fed hiring profile
• Managers as ICs — managers-as-ICs exists so that managers keep dogfooding the codebase
• Jagged Intelligence (Ghosts, Not Animals) — the Mr. Peanut catch is human taste catching what the ghost can't

Open Questions#

• Dogfooding works when the team is the user (Claude Code) or near it (Cat Wu, Boris). How do you build product sense for users very unlike you — does "talk to customers" fully substitute, as Glasgow/Fung's small-business work suggests?
• Can dogfooding scale, or does it implicitly cap how large an AI-native product org can stay taste-driven before it reverts to dashboards?

Sources#

• Running an AI-native engineering org
• How Anthropic's product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)
• The ERP for the AI Revolution is here