[curiousthought]

Someone on the inside being obsessed with the product. As a user.

There's a night and day difference between products that get used by the people who make it and those who ship it off to the user and wait for the response.

This is primarily aimed at B2C but there's plenty of cases where it applies in B2B as well (if you can somehow use your own product).

Dogfooding is one attempt to mimic this, and it can work. But what I really mean is someone inside the company actually cares enough, is interested enough, to use the product for themselves. Without being told to.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

I work on software to assist public transit. The fact that my own city uses this software, and that I use public transit all the time, is as close as I can get to this. Even that amount of interaction helps drive better UI/UX decisions quite a bit.