I thought this was a pretty interesting point. I was about to call it dogfooding but not quite, since it's more of an experience check than a crucial internal usage.
I imagine when investors or execs give rides, they probably don't generally reveal their affiliation, since that may skew the experience and the feedback. Though on the other hand, I suppose it could be helpful to say "I work at/with Lyft, how do you like the app?"
When you think about it, it seems so obvious that companies should do things like these, yet it still seems so rare. It's easy to fall out of touch with your users and product.
I believe every franchisee is required to attend Hamburger U. There are a number of corporate-owned stores in the area where the a lot of the staff is white-collar professionals in training. Those stores are always amazing.
In general stores in the Chicagoland region are way better than stores elsewhere, and I think part of this is due to the fact that corporate sends managers around for training here. I didn't understand the "mcflurry machine is broken" meme until I took a road trip. I had a number of horrible experiences, including a 20 minute wait for a mcflurry that ended up having more ice cream on the outside of the cup than the inside.
I used to work at the corporate headquarters of a company that owns several chain restaurants. The cafeteria there didn't have any of the chain food dishes, but was very high quality as far as office cafeterias go. They had a test kitchen there also and sometimes they'd give out free meals of the stuff they were testing.
Source: work for McDonald’s head office.