Jonathan Brill discusses MongoDB's adoption of a proactive "dogfooding" strategy, where internal teams use release candidates of MongoDB 8.0 on their production systems to identify and resolve any issues before the software is released to customers. This approach, alongside formal modeling methods like TLA+, helps uncover rare bugs and inefficiencies such as MongoDB server crashes and query inefficiencies. The dogfooding process has led to improved software reliability, increased customer trust, and a better understanding of customer needs by allowing engineers to experience the software's performance in real-world scenarios. Following internal testing, MongoDB successfully addressed issues like a primary node crash in the Amboy cluster and a query planner bug related to index pruning before these could affect customers. This process not only enhances product quality but also boosts credibility, as using MongoDB internally demonstrates its dependability. The company plans to formalize this process further to continue improving software reliability and customer satisfaction.