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Surveys in LinearB

Surveys in LinearB: Gather structured team feedback on developer experience, productivity, and tooling. Visualize results in real time with dashboards and heat maps to spot trends and drive improvement.

Steven Silverstone
Updated by Steven Silverstone

The Surveys feature in LinearB helps organizations collect structured feedback from engineering teams and analyze developer experience, productivity, tooling, AI adoption, and team satisfaction.

Surveys are distributed through Slack. Results appear in LinearB as overall and topic scores, team heatmaps, question-level answer distributions, and comments.

Access Surveys

  1. In the navigation bar, click Productivity > Surveys.
  2. Select Management to create and manage surveys, or Dashboard to analyze results.

Survey Permissions

Surveys are managed at the organization level.

Only Primary Admins and Super Users can create, edit, launch, end, and view surveys and survey results.

Action Primary Admin Super User Team Manager Regular User
Create surveys
Edit draft surveys
Launch surveys
End surveys
View survey results
Surveys are an organization-level feature and are not scoped to individual teams.

Management Tab

The Management tab lists running, completed, and draft surveys. Each survey row includes:

  • Name: The internal survey name, with the respondent-facing display name beneath it.
  • Start date: The date the survey was launched.
  • End date: The date the survey was ended, when applicable.
  • Participants: All employees or the selected participant teams and groups.
  • Topics: The standard and custom topics included in the survey.
  • Status: Draft, Running, or Completed.
  • Responses: The submitted response count. When a participant total is available, progress is shown as responses out of eligible participants.

Available actions depend on the survey status:

  • Edit and launch draft for a draft survey.
  • End survey for a running survey.
  • View results for a completed survey.
  • Open the row menu to Preview survey, Send reminder, or Duplicate survey. Delete is available only when the survey state permits it.
Surveys remain active until they are manually ended from the Management tab.

Survey Distribution

After launch, participants receive a secure survey link through Slack. The link remains active until the survey is manually ended.

During setup, LinearB identifies selected participants who cannot receive the Slack survey link. Select Manage User Details to review affected users.

Make sure selected participants are connected to Slack before launching the survey.

Dashboard and Analysis

Select a survey from the survey selector. The Dashboard shows the survey date range, overall score, response count, comment count, and a team-by-topic results table. Click Export to export the displayed results.

Scores

  • Rating-scale questions use a 1–5 agreement scale, from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.
  • A question score is the average of its eligible rating responses.
  • A topic score summarizes the rating-scale questions in that topic.
  • The overall score summarizes the scored results in the selected survey.
  • For a reverse-scored custom question, LinearB aligns the score so a higher value continues to represent a better result.
  • Open-text custom questions collect comments and do not produce a numeric score.

Heatmap

  • All Participants shows the survey-wide average for each topic.
  • All Teams and the individual team rows show team-level topic averages.
  • Cell colors highlight comparatively stronger and weaker scores.
  • Results that cannot be displayed appear as N/A.

Click a heatmap cell to open the selected team and topic. The drill-down shows the topic score, participant and comment counts, question-level averages, and expandable 1–5 answer distributions.

Privacy and Anonymity

  • Scores are not displayed for a topic, question, or team with fewer than 3 responses.
  • Hidden scores appear as N/A.
  • Comments are hidden when fewer than 5 comments were received for the selected result.
Score visibility and comment visibility use different anonymity thresholds.

Managed and Organization-wide Results

For surveys sent to selected participants, selected teams remain listed even when their results display as N/A. For an organization-wide survey, only teams with submitted responses appear in team-level views.

If team-level data is unavailable, LinearB displays topic-level results instead of a team heatmap. You can still open a topic to inspect its questions, distributions, and eligible comments.

Using Survey Results

  • Use topic averages to identify broad strengths and concerns.
  • Use the heatmap to compare teams.
  • Open a cell to identify the questions driving a score.
  • Use eligible comments to understand the context behind the numbers.
  • Run surveys regularly to track changes over time.

Troubleshooting

Participants did not receive the survey link

Verify that the participants are connected to Slack. Review the Distribution step and select Manage User Details to see users who cannot receive notifications.

Scores are missing or a team shows N/A

There are fewer than 3 eligible responses for the relevant question, topic, or team.

Comments are hidden

Comments are hidden to protect anonymity when fewer than 5 comments were received for the selected result.

How did we do?

Creating a Survey in LinearB

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