In March, the co-founder and head of consumer engineering at DoorDash, Andy Fang, could be found dropping off an order from a sushi restaurant to a customer’s apartment in San Francisco.
The food delivery app had restarted its WeDash programme that requires all of its salaried employees in the US, Canada and Australia to get out on the road and make deliveries. “It’s pretty core to our DNA as a company . . . it ties to one of our values of being customer-obsessed,” says Fang.
The act of testing your own product or service has been dubbed “dogfooding” in the technology world. It traditionally took place in software development but the use of the term has since expanded to refer to other employee initiatives such as spending time in frontline roles. When DoorDash was created in 2013 the founders carried out deliveries themselves out of necessity. Its WeDash initiative, which began in earnest in 2015 before being paused during the pandemic, has turned a necessity into company policy.