Today I’m not going to share anything new or revolutionary with you but it might be one of the most important things when building a product. By building a product you’ll use yourself you’ll be more likely to make the right decisions and help your users.

Understand your product

As the product builder you know what the product should do but you’ll be amazed what some users will end up doing with it. Of course most of your users will use your product the way you intended it to be used but you’ll be surprised how creative people can get. Not being a user of your own product will make it a lot harder to understand these ‘creative’ edge case scenarios.

Find bugs first

Let’s admit it, most of us aren’t the best testers. This has nothing to do with not wanting to put the time or effort into testing, it’s because we’re testing what the plugin should do in the scenario we just developed. By actually using your own product you will at least once run into a bug yourself. Finding the bug yourself saves the whole process of trying to reproduce the bug or asking for more details.

Making better decisions

As a product owner you will get feature requests and advise from everyone on what your product is missing and should do. Some of this advise might be really good but most if it has the potential of killing your product. Being an active user of your own product will make your judgement a lot better in this wave of advise and feature requests because you know what it’s like to use your product.

Using your own product will make you much more connected with it resulting in higher quality and better customer understanding. Are you using your own product?