I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

Dogfooding works

I don't think this is an example of that. This is just engineers being able to talk directly to customers, which is great in most cases. I absolutely loved my jobs where I could directly talk to the users of our products, especially when they came to me with bugs or problems.

Unfortunately, that's not always possible. I wonder if that's why I always liked building tools for "internal" clients, other users within the org - it was trivial to just Slack someone or ask if I could walk over to their desk.

difficult to do unless you're building tooling/personal productivity stuff. i don't know how a company would dogfood a point-of-sale platform, for example.

Like this. =)

Force the people making it to use it for a while. Even just a day.

fair!