Surveys in LinearB

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 personalized Slack direct messages (DMs). Pre-existing Microsoft Teams-connected organizations with Surveys already enabled continue using link-based distribution. Results appear in LinearB as overall and topic scores, team heatmaps, question-level answer distributions, predefined-answer selections, and comments.

Survey Availability

Surveys are generally available (GA). Availability depends on your organization's connection and existing enablement:

• Slack-connected organizations: Surveys are available automatically.
• Pre-existing Microsoft Teams-connected organizations with Surveys already enabled: Continue using the existing link-based distribution workflow.
• Other organizations: Connect Slack or contact LinearB Support to request manual enablement. Organizations without Slack cannot enable Surveys themselves.

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.

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.

Survey Distribution

After launch, participants receive a personalized, secure magic link in a Slack DM. Participants can open their link and complete the survey without logging in to LinearB. 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.

Slack Contributors and Participant Matching

Find Slack Contributors under Settings > Users & Teams. LinearB automatically matches developer identities to Slack accounts. If an identity cannot be matched automatically, manually assign the correct Slack account using the participant's email address or Slack Member ID.

Use Manage User Details during survey setup to review participants who cannot receive Slack notifications and resolve unmatched identities before launch.

Existing Link-based Distribution

Pre-existing Microsoft Teams-connected organizations with Surveys already enabled retain their existing link-based distribution workflow. This continuation does not introduce Microsoft Teams as a new survey distribution method. Other organizations should connect Slack or contact LinearB Support to request manual enablement.

Survey Reminders

For a running survey, select Send reminder from the row menu in the Management tab to send a Slack reminder to participants who have not responded. You can send one reminder per survey per 24 hours.

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 and predefined-answer custom questions do not produce a numeric score.

Predefined Answer Choice Results

• Predefined-answer questions show how responses are distributed across the available choices.
• Each respondent can select one answer.
• Responses entered through an Other option are treated as free text.
• Predefined-answer questions are not included in question, topic, or overall survey scores.

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, open-text answers, predefined-answer selections, and Other write-ins are hidden when fewer than 5 responses were received for the selected result.

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 predefined-answer distributions to identify common selections.
• Use eligible comments and free-text answers to understand the context behind the numbers.
• Run surveys regularly to track changes over time.

Troubleshooting

Related Articles

• Creating a Survey in LinearB
• Managing Teams in LinearB