Software development teams are under constant pressure to iterate quickly. As new features offer a potential competitive edge, engineers are pushed to deliver fast and release often. In the sprint to get updates out the door, teams often skip one of the most valuable ways to improve feature quality.
Only when development teams go beyond the role of a builder to a genuine user who proactively engages with their product in none-test conditions, will they deliver meaningful impact. While continuous testing is key to delivering functionality, developers who shift from creator to customer have a more robust understanding of how value is delivered.
Rather than simply identifying bugs during testing cycles, teams can genuinely elevate the user experience before deploying the solution to customers. As a result, the development process goes from a linear progression to a more dynamic cycle of continuous value validation.
Treat your engineers like the customer
When teams actively engage with their own software, they get conditions that testing environments can’t reproduce. As a result, genuine discovery can happen naturally, often mirroring or even exceeding the complexity customers face with their own use cases. This unlocks a powerful cycle of continuous innovation that goes beyond traditional testing methods, leading to novel discoveries that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
At Dynatrace, we’ve embraced the “Dynatrace on Dynatrace” philosophy whereby internal teams don’t just test the platform but live within it daily. Following an internal feature delivery, the team realised that observability extended far beyond technical metrics. This resulted in the team combining business information with technical observability data to create a more comprehensive understanding of product performance and user value.
This approach has created a powerful innovation loop that enables new use cases that align with customer requirements to emerge organically. So much so that today’s solutions inspire tomorrow’s innovations.
It's better to find problems at home
Another core benefit of teams embracing their own tools is that it ensures bugs can be fixed outside of the customer environment. When a bug is discovered by a customer, businesses pay twice: first on the cost to fix the bug and second in damages to the customer relationship.
By using the product internally, teams create a protected environment in which failure becomes a learning opportunity rather than a reputational risk. Authentic user conditions mean that features undergo genuine stress-testing without public exposure, while also providing teams with more measured feedback. Rather than relying on customers who may just abandon problematic features, friction points and functional issues can be revised so that teams can feel more confident when it comes to that all important launch moment.
Building trust through your own success
When technology vendors use their own solutions to drive business operations, it signals the upmost confidence that goes far beyond marketing messaging. Given the importance of operational reliability, especially in a B2B context, internal adoption demonstrates that the product is reliable enough to stake the company’s own success upon. This acts as a powerful trust signal to potential customers.
Internal adoption also enables key customer decision-makers to see how challenges can be handled using the product. This in turn provides insights into real-world performance that no demo or case study can offer. Transparency into how the product is used internally not only builds confidence in the functionality of the product but also demonstrates that the vendor is committed to ongoing innovation.
As software buyers become increasingly sceptical about claims of innovation, an immediate red flag is when a vendor does not use their own product. It immediately raises questions about product capabilities, vendor confidence, and the disconnect between marketing promises and operational reality. The most compelling sales story is the one told by the vendor’s daily successes as opposed to a carefully crafted sales narrative.
Becoming your own best customer
The success of a new feature launch relies on lived experience with the product, not from passing automated tests alone. By proactively engaging with the product daily, development teams have a more robust understanding of its transformative impact as well as its practical limitations before any customer encounters them.
Shipping new features without internal stress-testing is like navigating without instruments in an increasingly competitive market which can prove costly for vendors in an increasingly competitive market. By becoming their own best customers, vendors can deliver truly innovative products that they themselves depend on.
Thomas Reisenbichler
Thomas Reisenbichler is VP of Delivery, Reliability & Security at Dynatrace.
