Importance of Surveys in Improving Developer Productivity

This week we’re joined by Mark Côté, who leads the Developer Infrastructure organization at Shopify, to learn about their developer survey program. Mark shares what went into designing and running the survey, what they’ve done to drive participation rates higher, and how they interpret their data.

Mentions and links:

• Follow Mark on LinkedIn
• Read Shopify’s engineering blog

Discussion points:

• (1:32) Starting the survey
• (3:20) How the survey has evolved
• (4:22) Three types of information gleaned from the survey
• (7:37) Designing and running the survey
• (12:28) Participation rates
• (15:12) Why there's an increase of interest in the results at Shopify
• (17:42) What's affecting participation rates
• (23:03) Selecting survey questions
• (27:01) Refining survey questions
• (28:54) Survey length
• (30:56) Analyzing the results 
• (33:31) How the data is stored and shared
• (35:56) Sending targeted surveys to the right developers 
• (37:40) Using the results as a Developer Acceleration organization
• (39:29) Confidence in the data
• (41:27) The value of a developer survey