By Kraken Dogfooding Program Lead Andre Lezan Fernandes
At Kraken, utilizing our personal merchandise is cultural infrastructure.
From their first days, each Krakenite reads Kraken Tradition Defined, authored by co-founder Jesse Powell and foundational to how we function. One among its core ideas is obvious:
Know Thyself. Know Thy Enemy. Know Thy Buyer.
For us, understanding the client requires greater than analysis, surveys, or dashboards. It requires participation.
- We commerce on Kraken.
- We custody property on Kraken.
- We use our apps each day, with actual funds, in dwell markets.
We depend on the identical infrastructure our purchasers depend on.
That dedication shapes how we construct.
Why proximity calls for self-discipline
Groups that construct merchandise inevitably develop context. They perceive tradeoffs, constraints, and implementation particulars. That experience is crucial but it surely additionally creates blind spots.
Friction turns into acquainted. Workarounds change into instinctive. Small imperfections change into normalized.
Dogfooding is how we counter that impact.
At Kraken, it’s not confined to QA or engineering. It’s company-wide. Engineers, compliance professionals, entrepreneurs, finance specialists, authorized consultants, buyer engagement groups; everybody actively makes use of our merchandise and contributes suggestions.
As a result of perspective is experience.
- A marketer instantly feels whether or not the expertise matches our promise
- A buyer engagement specialist acknowledges patterns of confusion early
- A compliance skilled sees readability gaps others could overlook.
High quality improves when numerous, knowledgeable views intersect.
A program, not a slogan
Tradition units expectations. Construction makes them actionable.
Our Dogfooding Program encourages and rewards lively participation throughout the corporate. Krakenites are anticipated to make use of our merchandise deeply and report friction, edge instances, unclear flows, and enchancment alternatives.
We’ve made reporting easy and low-friction:
- No have to establish the workforce that owns the product
- No have to draft an ideal bug report
- No want to guage whether or not a problem is “sufficiently big” to be price reporting
If it impacts the expertise, it issues.
To strengthen that conduct, we acknowledge and reward our most engaged contributors. This isn’t gamification for optics; it’s reinforcement of accountability. The message is easy: in the event you construct monetary infrastructure for thousands and thousands, you are taking duty for experiencing it your self.
Excellence lives within the margins
Most significant high quality enhancements by no means originate from vital incidents. They arrive from delicate friction:
An additional faucet. An ambiguous affirmation. Copy that’s technically correct however barely unclear. A movement that works however doesn’t encourage confidence.
Individually, these are minor. Collectively, they outline belief.
Shoppers come to Kraken to handle property that matter deeply to them. Each interplay both strengthens that belief or quietly erodes it. Dogfooding permits us to detect and deal with these micro-signals earlier than they scale.
It enhances formal QA, safety audits, and rigorous testing. It doesn’t change them. It provides lived accountability.
New-Krakenite dogfooding buying and selling competitions
All new hires are invited to take part in a buying and selling competitors after their first quarter. Contributors are supplied with company-funded capital and compete in a managed, low-risk atmosphere designed to encourage studying, experimentation, and product exploration.
The target isn’t hypothesis. It’s fluency.
By inserting trades, managing positions, navigating superior order varieties, transferring funds, and interacting with market volatility firsthand, Krakenites develop sensible understanding of the instruments our purchasers use on daily basis.
This initiative serves a number of functions:
- Deepens product literacy throughout each operate
- Strengthens empathy for shopper decision-making
- Surfaces real-world friction factors
- Builds confidence in navigating dwell markets
It’s also, fairly merely, an funding in our individuals. It’s our likelihood to encourage (and fund) their hands-on participation within the very markets they energy.
Past buying and selling competitions, we preserve a Dogfooding Leaderboard to spotlight the Krakenites who contribute essentially the most – and reward them, with prizes paid in crypto, month-to-month.
For potential Krakenites, these initiatives mirror one thing essential: you received’t construct from a distance. You’ll have interaction instantly with the platform, the markets, and the client expertise you assist form.
For builders and for purchasers
For potential Krakenites, this tradition issues.
For those who be part of Kraken, you received’t construct in abstraction. You’ll expertise your individual work. You’ll really feel its strengths and its friction. You should have each the duty and the mechanism to enhance it.
For our purchasers, this dedication is equally essential.
High quality at Kraken just isn’t owned by a single division. It’s a distributed duty embedded in each day conduct. The identical platform you rely upon is the platform we rely on.
That alignment creates a better normal.
We use what we construct as a result of accountability compounds.
And in an business the place belief is every part, that self-discipline is non-negotiable.
The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the writer and don’t essentially symbolize the views or opinions of Kraken or its administration.
