Eat Your Own Dogfood
Why we’re not shipping new features in late June.
June 17, 2026 — By Brent Miller
I’ve taught long enough to know the feeling. The software you’re required to use makes you click through six menus to do one thing. It loses your work when you forget to hit save. It exports your students’ grades to a file that won’t import next semester. It demands a training video before it’ll let you do the thing you’ve been doing for fifteen years. It feels like a tool designed for someone else, used by you.
You’re right. It is.
Most education software is built by programmers who have never taught a class. It’s funded by investors whose customers are administrators, IT directors, and procurement committees — not the teachers who’ll actually live in it for forty hours a week. The people designing the buttons don’t press them themselves. The people approving the contracts don’t have to write revision exercises with the result. By the time the software reaches you, it’s been polished for what’s measurable to the buyer: feature lists, compliance checkmarks, demo videos. The experience of deciphering students’ homework results on a Tuesday afternoon with a class of restless students waiting for you? Nobody on the design team will ever feel that.
This is why so much EdTech is awful. It’s not malice. It’s distance.
At Lesson Commons we think we’re building something better. We are teachers. We’ve felt the distance from the other side, and we’ve designed accordingly. But we’re not naive enough to believe that’s enough on its own. Every craft — writing, course design, software, all of them — has rough spots on the first pass. The page that reads beautifully in your head doesn’t quite land on the student. The lesson plan that worked Wednesday flops Thursday. The button that seemed obvious to us turns out to need an explanation.
It’s normal. It’s just not done yet.
So for the rest of June, we are eating our own dogfood — the unlovely but exact phrase software people use for it. We are not adding any new features. We are using our own tools to write real courses: Italian A1 units, a B2 revision for a specific student, chemistry trivia question sets. We are sitting in the chair a teacher will sit in, taking the steps a teacher will take, feeling the rough spots where they live. Anything that frustrates us in the next two weeks gets fixed before the next release. Most of it nobody else will ever see. That’s the point.
For a teacher, ten small frustrations smoothed away in the tools you already use is more useful than one new feature you didn’t ask for. We believe that. So we’re proving it the only way we know how: two weeks of not building, and instead using.
We’ll see what we find.
Lesson Commons is an educational software platform for teachers and trainers. The Editor, Learn platform, and the LC-JSON open format are in active development. Follow updates at lessoncommons.com/news.
This article was written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). The author defined the purpose, audience, and main ideas, directed the editorial approach, and edited the final text. Claude assisted with structure and drafting.