Tips for running your first Feedback Survey
What are feedback surveys?
Easily collect user feedback about plugins or specific pages in Backstage with short pop-up surveys. As a Backstage champion, you can create surveys with custom questions to identify how users feel about Backstage. View this data alongside your usage data to get a full picture of how your organization is using Backstage and where there are opportunities for improvement.
To add a survey, see our documentation.
Spotify’s Recommendation
We recommend starting with one pop-up survey on the home page. The initial question should address the main challenge the customer is facing with Backstage. For example, if you are exploring Backstage for catalog ownership, consider asking a question about ownership tracking. After resolving this issue, update the survey question to address the next challenge, such as the ease of adding technical documentation. Insights pop-up surveys are most effective for gathering feedback on the most pressing issues related to Backstage adoption. When you are ready to run multiple surveys, we recommend one per page.
Recommendations based on your Backstage Usage
Just starting out
If you have less than 5% of your engineering organization active on Backstage (organization penetration = number of active users on Backstage divided by the number of users in your organization), which you can check in the Users section. Spotify experts recommend rolling out a single General Backstage Sentiment survey.
Use this initial survey for three months to collect general sentiment from all users. This will help gauge the initial experience and establish a baseline metric for future iterations and improvements. We recommend conducting this survey every six months for three months at a time, or every quarter for one month. This approach ensures you gather feedback from a randomized group, allowing you to track baseline sentiment consistently. By doing this, you can monitor your progress over time. 'General Backstage Sentiment' will become a standard metric for evaluating the usability and satisfaction of Backstage within your company.
General Backstage Sentiment Pop Up Survey Example
Recommendation for Organizations with more than 20% Backstage Penetration
If your organization has achieved 20% penetration on Backstage (i.e. 20% of your engineering organization actively uses Backstage), it is recommended to run a pop-up survey focused on your most popular plugin. To find out what is your most popular plugin or entity, this will help gather specific feedback on the plugin's usability and effectiveness, ensuring that it continues to meet your team’s needs and contributes to further adoption of Backstage.