It's easy to find a company that has some sort of dogfooding or employee testing program. But it's much more difficult to find one whose program delivers actionable user insights derived from co-worker product use — unlike those companies using delta testing tools and practices.
The teams in your company are really the very first users of your product. Before a single sale is made, your product should already be tested and adopted by your customer zero. Here's why companies are replacing their dogfooding and alpha testing programs with delta testing.
What Is Employee Testing?
Also known as dogfooding, alpha testing or internal user testing, employee testing is a delta testing use case that employs close collaboration between coworkers to surface real-world user experience issues.
Where Delta Dunks on Dogfooding
Leveraging your co-workers or employees to test your products and provide feedback isn't a groundbreaking concept. But delta testing with employees does more than improve your products — it also enriches buy-in and collaboration across your company. And it does it in a strategic way that accounts for the traditionally problematic lack of engagement from dogfooding initiatives, as well as the unfocused "bug hunt" mentality of alpha testing.
Delta testing delivers on employee testing initiatives by:
- Expanding product experience to teams across the organization
- Building collaboration between teams as they work towards a common goal
- Bringing other teams up to speed on new products prior to launch or release
- Repeatable steps for effective test execution
- Automation and data centralization to increase efficiency
- Tester scoring so you don’t keep inviting poorly engaged employees
- Delivering consistent ROI and evangelizing the importance of user testing and the voice of the customer in the organization
It Gathers Insider Insights
Employee testing improves quality and performance by drawing from the real-world product experiences of technical users from inside your organization. Their familiarity with your product makes them ideal candidates for rooting out issues. Unlike your target customers, who may not know what each feature is designed to achieve, employee testers offer suggestions and recommendations based on what your company offers and how your product is supposed to work.
By replacing the inconsistent results of alpha testing with focused employee input from delta testing, you'll surface and resolve bugs while lightening the load on engineering teams.
It Promotes a Product-Centric Culture
In addition to delivering more consistent results than alpha testing, employee testing has the secondary benefit of promoting a product-centric culture at your organization. Just like user testing your product with target market customers or VIP users, employee testers feel a sense of pride and ownership as they see their feedback and insights take shape within your product on its way to launch or release.
With a deepened investment in your product comes a deeper organizational commitment to its success, making it easier to set ego aside and unite around reaching the common goal.
Employee Testing with Centercode
Centercode Customer Zero delta programs offer an all-in-one solution for upgrading your employee-driven alpha or dogfooding tests. As an automated solution, it keeps even your busiest employee testers engaged and in the loop. Centralized feedback makes it easy to follow up with colleagues, share results, and track project progress.
Finally, Centercode measures everything along the way so you can see exactly how your project builds towards your product success. See how the Centercode Platform connects your product to your customers, starting with customer zero.
