dbt Labs doubles survey participation by switching to DX

dbt Labs creates software that helps analytics teams structure data for better business decisions. With approximately 350 employees, nearly a third of whom are engineers, developer productivity is essential. It enables developers to perform at their best, driving innovation and ensuring top-tier product quality.

The Engineering Operations and Enablement teams are tasked with removing obstacles to support this mission, but they faced challenges. “It was difficult to bring concrete evidence and data to justify where we needed to better enable engineers,” says Brian Webb, Head of Engineering Operations at dbt Labs.

The team built a survey with Google Forms, but participation rates stalled below 50%, leaving gaps in understanding developer challenges. Running and analyzing the survey also required significant time, limiting their ability to make decisions using the data.

“Running these assessments manually and analyzing the data consumed valuable time and still didn’t give us the actionable insights we needed,” Webb explains. “We realized that building this in-house would require far more resources than we could justify, and even then, we wouldn’t have achieved the same quality of insights.”

dbt adopted DX for a better approach to capturing developer experience data. Within weeks, participation rates doubled from under 50% to over 90%, providing a much clearer view of developer pain points. This data, combined with guidance from DX, helped EngOps prioritize high-impact issues while enabling teams to address localized challenges independently.

“There is no doubt that DX made sense from a business impact, cost, and time perspective,” Webb shares. “The DX survey quickly allowed us to pinpoint where developers were feeling the most pain and friction in their workflows. DX enabled our internal services team and the entire engineering organization to address the highest-impact and most painful developer feedback points.”

Today, DX is central to dbt Labs’ developer enablement strategy, driving continuous improvement. “We see engineering leaders at all levels bringing forward DX data points to address the highest-impact pain points,” Webb adds. Looking ahead, dbt Labs plans to use DX data to refine workflows, address recurring challenges, and guide quarterly planning to align leadership and engineering teams as they grow.