Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is using ‘dogfooding’ technique to retain and engage its employees. Dogfooding is a common practice of most IT companies for fixing the bugs in the application they create, but Facebook goes a step beyond by using the technique to retain employees, says a report from The Economic Times. Facebook is using this technique to engage its young employees, with most of them being in their twenties and edgy and/or impatient.
Technique gratifying to employees
Involving employees through this technique is gratifying and makes them feel like a part of the decision-making process. Both of these factors are important to retain the young employees.
James Mitchell, head of the Hyderabad office (India), Facebook says “Dogfooding is one of the best outlets that we can provide for young, enterprising intelligent minds. It binds them to the product and the company very strongly.” He said that dogfooding is the standard through which voice of the employees can be heard.
“Plus, Facebook has offices around the world and dogfooding keeps us all connected and more importantly, involved,” says Mitchell.
‘Mobile first’ shift gave technique more importance
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) started greater use of this technique after shifting to ‘mobile first’ – a strategy where the company wanted all employees to use the mobile app and give their reviews on them. Globally, Facebook has 5,299 employees and more than 100 in India. Of its 1.15 billion global users, India accounts for 82 million.
According to another executive, Facebook achieved success following dogfooding strategy because employees who are in their twenties love Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), and are active users. Shomir Dutt, who is a product specialist at its Hyderabad office, explains three parts of dogfooding. He said that there is general dogfooding such as testing the hashtags launched by Facebook. Another one is hacking a product for few hours, and the last one is market-specific dogfooding for the products released in India.
Change as a result of dogfeed technique
In the process of dogfooding, a suggestion was made to change the registration for Indian users by making it more customized, which saw the change in date format to DDMMYY whereas for the rest of the world it is MMDDYY. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has divided its employees’ time in such a way that 50% to 60% of the time is absorbed in doing routine work whereas for the remaining 30% to 40% of time, the work is not defined, which suggests that employees can easily give their time to dogfooding.
