You need 80%+ survey participation - Here’s why and how

One-minute summary

• DX consistently achieves 90%+ participation across 200+ companies, delivering data leaders can trust, while most homegrown surveys fall below 30% participation.
• Why 80%+ participation matters:
  • Executive buy-in: High participation ensures leaders see data as credible and actionable.
  • Reliable benchmarks: Accurate participation produces metrics that objectively assess engineering performance.
  • Team-level insights: High participation provides actionable data for managers to improve at every level.
• How DX achieves industry-leading participation:
  • Expert-designed surveys targeted for meaningful, concise responses.
  • Real-time insights that keep teams engaged and show immediate value.
  • Integrated tools like Slack and Teams to meet developers in their workflow.
  • Partnership-driven rollout support to maximize engagement.
• DX turns survey data into the foundation of your developer experience program, empowering leaders and teams with trusted, actionable insights.

Full article

Nearly every DevEx initiative that relies on homegrown surveys misses the threshold for real impact: 80%+ survey participation. In fact, most struggle to reach 20-30%. At these levels, survey data can only provide directional assumptions. To actually improve developer experience, engineering organizations need reliable insights.

Solving this problem is core to DX’s mission – we’re setting a new standard for developer survey participation. Across 200+ companies, regardless of size, DX consistently achieves 90%+ participation—a level even world-class engineering organizations with vast resources rarely reach with homegrown surveys.

Why you need 80%+ participation

At 80%+ survey participation, people trust that the data provides an accurate view of developer experience, paving the way for meaningful insights and alignment. Without this, you can’t drive real improvements to developer experience, your technology practice, or your business.

Here are three critical outcomes that DX unlocks with high survey participation:

• Executive buy-in: Low participation fuels skepticism among leaders, who see the data as statistically unreliable or biased. Without strong participation, survey insights lack the credibility leaders need for decision-making—whether it’s a VPE, a CTO, or a CEO. At 80%+ participation, leaders can trust and rely on the data to guide important decisions.
• Reliable benchmarks and metrics: Benchmarking key metrics is essential for assessing the health of an engineering organization and identifying areas for improvement. But this is only possible with accurate data. DX’s high participation rates produce highly accurate metrics and benchmarks, giving your company an objective assessment of performance.

• Actionable data for managers and teams: Software organizations are broken into teams and units, each with unique assignments and ways of working. For insights to be actionable at the team level, there needs to be a critical mass of survey data from each team. Through high survey participation rates, DX enables team-level reporting, giving managers and teams the specific info they need to drive improvement at every level.

  “ “I got the information I needed, but then came the questions: Can we drill down? How’s this team or that persona doing? What about folks in Europe versus the US? I couldn’t easily get that information. That was one of the game changers with DX. With DX, I could easily go in and view data by business unit, team, persona, et cetera.”

  - Russ Nealis, Platform PM, Plaid

With DX, survey data becomes a trusted guide for leaders, a reliable benchmarking tool, and a source of insight for teams at every level. Anything less makes it very difficult to build and sustain a successful developer experience program.

How DX does it

DX’s industry-leading participation rates aren’t accidental; they’re the result of a thoughtfully designed platform founded on decades of research into developer experience. Here’s how DX consistently delivers participation rates that transform survey data into a strategic asset:

• Expert-designed surveys: DX surveys are designed by experts in both developer experience and survey science. Each question is targeted and relevant, ensuring that it captures meaningful insights without overburdening participants. This precision increases participation and creates data that leaders and teams alike can trust.

• Instant, actionable insights: Unlike traditional surveys that require long wait times to see results, DX delivers immediate feedback through the platform. Teams get access to real-time insights, making it “worth it” to participate and see their input reflected in actionable ways. This approach fuels sustained engagement and proves the value of participation.

• Change management expertise: DX offers more than just a software platform. DX is a continued partner that helps you with communication, change management, and rollout. This ensures that leaders and teams recognize the purpose and benefits of engaging, as well as the value of each survey cycle. DX’s proven approach ensures that surveys aren’t just seen as an administrative task but as an important tool for organizational improvement.

  “ “Moreover I’m a massive fan of the team that I’ve worked with over the last few years, as I brought product thinking into Monzo’s platform collective. I’m not just grateful for the partnership but the relationship I’ve built.”

  - Jarryd Trokis, Engineering Manager, Attio

Integrations with Slack and Teams: DX meets developers where they’re working. With out of the box Slack and Teams integrations, survey notifications and reminders are delivered directly in the flow of work. This reduces friction and keeps survey participation top of mind, driving consistent engagement across the organization.

The foundation for developer experience

DX elevates survey data from basic feedback to the foundation for your developer experience program.

By consistently achieving leading participation rates for qualitative data—and supporting that with quantitative data from system metrics—DX delivers trusted insights to the business, supports engineering teams with actionable data, and drives real change.

To learn more about how DX impacts developer experience, you can request a demo or download our guide on creating world class developer experience surveys.