Eating Our Own Dog Food: 8 Months of Career Conversations using GoFIGR

There's a phrase in the tech industry: "Eat your own dog food." It means using your own product to validate its quality. For those outside the realm of product development, it might sound a bit odd, but in essence, it's a real-world test of one's own creation.

For the past 8 months, my colleague Stephanie Wong and I have been doing just that – using our platform to hold and record our monthly career conversations.Here's what we've learned.

• The Power of Consistency: Our monthly conversations gave us the chance to realize the importance of consistency. It’s easy to let weeks or even months fly by without taking a moment to prioritize her career growth. By using our platform for these discussions, we found that regular check-ins and great record keeping held us accountable and ensured we followed up on what we committed to. We decided to add in AI to speed up note-taking.
  

• Career Conversations Require both Structure and Flexibility: We're both busy and will both admit to not always coming into career conversations quite as prepared as we would love to... We realized we wanted templates to help structure our conversations with the flexibility to let the conversation lead where it needed to. We're about to release a new set of career conversation templates as a result.
  

• Coming up with Career Development Ideas Requires Imagination: Steph and I are both innovators and having met in our past lives at Deloitte, we know each other well enough find it easy to think of quick, cheap and clever ways to offer her development. We know not everyone thinks like this so we're beta-testing a new generative AI feature to boost creativity.
  

• The Importance of Employee Career Development: Our career conversations aren't just about testing our platform – they're also personal. We discuss Steph's ambitions, the skills she wants to hone, and what might hold her back. As a manager myself, the prospect of ever losing Steph is awful so I'm committed to doing whatever it takes to keep her happy, motivated and feeling like she's making progress (we now have a system of record as proof).
  

• It Gave us New Ideas: Throughout these 8 months, we’ve had to iterate and adapt, both in our conversations and in how we utilized the platform (and force ourselves to go back to Steph when we slipped into product!). This experience showed us that stagnation is the enemy of innovation. Our platform, like all software, needs to evolve with the requirements of its users. We've designed a new action planning feature off the back of the pain we felt taking notes.
  

• Employee Experience Matters: There were times when a lag or a bug interrupted our flow. These instances, while initially frustrating, were invaluable. They reinforced that a seamless user experience isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. Every hiccup, no matter how minor, can deter a user. Every month, we each meet between 5-10 employees to test new ideas and learn about their needs.
  

Eating our own dog food continues to be an enlightening experience and one we won't stop.If you'd like to see what Steph, me and the rest of the team have been up to, come and book in with me for a chat.

And who knows, you might just have the new product idea we've been looking for!

PS the photo is of Steph's dog, Kumo, whose food we definitely WON'T eat :-)