What I Learned Being My Own Beta User. (Part 1)

In the late 1980s, a worker at Microsoft wrote an email encouraging employees to “eat our own dog food.” The phrase was meant to encourage employees to focus on building products that they would use themselves. It was a way to emphasize putting the user experience first and establishing a high bar to serve consumers by introducing “beta testing” so employees have to literally walk in the users’ shoes and see how it feels to experience the product. Since then, it has become a common phrase used among tech teams building apps and products - many changing the phrase from “dog food” to just “food” for obvious reasons. 

We won’t put anything on the plate at ThriveIEP that we haven’t already eaten. This means that our team - now and in the future - will continue to use and test our product experience.  In fact, right now I’m (hands down) our most active beta pilot user. 

Even with 7 years of experience navigating special education, I still had a hard time working through the pile of papers I needed to understand to be an effective participant in our special education eligibility meeting. 

As a beta user, here’s what I did:

1. I collected my documents and uploaded them into the ThriveIEP platform.
2. I answered some basic questions about my concerns and hopes. 
3. I waited while the team reviewed those documents and leveraged technology to turn dozens of pages of documents into something that helped me understand (1) what they mean, (2) why they matter, and (3) what to do about them.

Over the next few blogs, I’ll break down exactly what I received after doing those 3 simple steps.