Recently I spent a week or so in Hamilton attending Fielddays, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest agricultural show. Fielddays is always lots of fun – tens of thousands of people through the gates, hundreds of exhibitors selling everything from combine harvesters to bottles of gin. For us at Cactus, it is an awesome opportunity to get face-to-face with customers, many of whom don’t get off the farm often and hence would likely never visit one of our retail stores.
This year’s Fielddays included some inclement weather, one of the days included torrential rain, wind and the skies generally threatening Noah-like conditions. I spent a lot of time that day standing outside enjoying being completely dry in one of our raincoats. Sometimes making the best workwear in the world brings its advantages.
If I were in Silicon Valley, my behaviour would have been described as dogfooding. In the world of tech, dogfooding means consistently using a product you built, just as a user might, to figure out what works and what needs to be fixed. In my case, I was pleasantly reminded that the product works and I could smugly prance around totally dry. But beyond the waterproofness of rainwear, I wanted to write a little bit about that notion of dogfooding.
Recently I came across an article by David Risher, the CEO of Lyft. For those who haven’t come across it before, lift is a ridesharing application and arguably the best-known competitor to Uber. The two started at similar times and have gone head to head battling it out since. Lyft likes to differentiate itself from Uber by providing better customer experience.
But if you’re the CEO of a company trying to sell a customer service proposition, how do you actually test whether that promise is delivered? That’s where dogfooding comes in. Risher decided to spend an hour and a half one weekend as a Lyft driver, making trips and assessing people’s experience with the company. He went incognito and played the part of a regular Lyft driver.
He drove three rides and explained in his article how all three riders were complementary of Lyft and considered it better than the competitors. He obtained some feedback that would be useful in his decision-making process as CEO and he got away from the legion of people reporting to him who no doubt filter the messages he hears. It was a masterclass in taking the temperature of the organisation from the grassroots.
It’s an approach that is replicable across different sectors – if you’re the CEO or board member of a construction company, don some hi-vis and head out for a day working on site. If you run a manufacturing plant, head downstairs and work on the line. If you’re an executive for a hotel chain, go and do a day with the housemaids who clean the rooms.
Beyond assessing the customer experience that your organisation gives, it also delivers some other benefits. Most notably, when dogfooding isn’t happening in an incognito manner, it shows both staff and customers that a leader is approachable and available. I’ve had the fortune of being served on long-haul Air New Zealand flights by three successive CEOs. Rob Fyfe, Chris Luxon and Greg Foran have all taken the opportunity to serve drinks alongside the regular cabin crew
There are other benefits to dogfooding as well. Both Uber and Lyft have been roundly criticised for treating workers badly and, in particular, providing a service that sees staff earn far less than they would do if they were regular cab drivers. In the Lyft example, Risher took the opportunity to answer these concerns by detailing what he earned for his trip, the cut that Lyft takes to cover its not-insignificant costs and the extended benefits that he saw Lyft offering drivers.
Every exec in the world is pressed for time, and with almost infinite things which one could choose to do, sometimes interacting on the shopfloor, be it literal or metaphorical, falls by the wayside. But I reckon there are a bunch of leaders out there who would be well advised to give dogfooding a go. And if any of them need an utterly reliable raincoat to do it in, I know just the guy.
