Feedback Scoring and Gap Analysis
An alternative to NPS that turns qualitative feedback �into quantitative data, to help you understand how users �perceive your product.
NPS pros and cons
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
Aside: If you’re still using NPS
try this question instead
“If you were to move to a different team or company that wasn’t using [product name], how likely would you be to recommend its use?”
More relevant for engineers
Useful signal for Sales
An alternative to NPS
Feedback scoring
Turn qualitative feedback into data you can quantify.
Gap analysis
Identify mismatches between user expectations and what you’re currently providing.
A combination of…
How it works
📋 Step 1: Survey users
Users are sent a survey with a set of statements that they’re asked to rank on a scale of how much they agree or disagree.
How it works
📊 Step 2: Plot the results
Response scores for each statement are averaged across all users and plotted on a radial graph.
Supports the languages and integrations I care about
Helps me understand my company’s security posture
The tool is user friendly
Simple to ingrain into existing workflows
The support team is responsive and helpful
How it works
🎯 Step 3: Set goals
Goals are set to increase the average scores over a set time period, and new responses are tracked throughout to check if sentiment is improving.
Supports the languages and integrations I care about
Helps me understand my company’s security posture
The tool is user friendly
Simple to ingrain into existing workflows
The support team is responsive and helpful
💡 Tip
Review how the feedback is changing over time. Ensure teams are coming up with their own ideas for how to solve this, and aren’t relying exclusively on the data – the data is a good foundation, but they should be reaching out to users for further validation.
Ideas for feedback statements
A few prompts to help you come up with your own feedback statements
Customer Support: Have users been satisfied with the level of support provided when they reach out to the support team? Is it fast? Do they feel the team is knowledgeable?
Values: This can be quite broad - you might want to focus on company values such as supporting the open source community, or on a theme such whether users believe the company is developer-focused, if that’s important to your success.
Purpose: Do users feel that they’re able to achieve what they were promised when signing up?
Performance: Does the product feel fast to use? This can be measured quantitatively, but it's also helpful to understand the difference between actual performance and the user's perception of performance.
Documentation: Do users find it easy to find information?
Integrations: Do users feel that the product has the integrations they need? Do those integrations feel cohesive?
Workflows: Do users find it easy to ingrain the product into their existing workflows or are they having to change their process?
Language Support: Do users feel the product has sufficient support for the languages they use?
User Experience: Do users find the product intuitive?
Enterprise ready: If you're trying to break into the enterprise market, craft a statement on whether users feel that the product has enough capabilities to meet the needs of large businesses.
Security: Do users trust that the product is secure? Perception is important - you might put a lot of effort into making the product secure, but if the user doesn't feel like it's secure, that's also an issue that needs to be addressed.
💡 Tip
Take time to craft your statements as you’ll need to ask them in exactly the same way each time to enable accurate comparison of responses over time.
Example statements
Feedback gathering methods
You don’t have to ask all the questions at once – you could ask a single randomised question. Use a range of tools to gather feedback if users interact with your product outside of your web app.
Link to the survey in a GitHub issue or comment
Allow users to complete the survey in the CLI
💡 Tip
Have a bank of as many different statements as you want to get feedback on, but don’t ask individuals too many at once (ideally no more than 6) to increase the chance that someone will complete the form. Add a text field at the end so the responder can add more detail if they want.
Segmentation
Split your results into cohorts to understand how experiences differ
New users
Mature users
Team size <10
Team size 10-100
Team size 100-1000
Starter plan
Pro plan
Enterprise plan
Free
paying
💡 Tip
Make sure the Customer Success team has access to a live feed of the responses so they can reach out to the user to address any concerns.
Resources
📋
Example survey (Google Form)
About boldstart
Before you build your team, before you write your first line of code, before you even take your first check—that’s when boldstart gets to work.
We collaborate with technical founders well before company creation, lead pre-product rounds at inception, and rally our developer-first and SaaS network to help turn bold ideas into category-creating iconic companies.
We’ve been in the trenches with Snyk, Blockdaemon, Kustomer, BigID, Superhuman (and so many more) from day one.
For Developer First, Crypto Infra & SaaS Founders.
Anna Debenham
Anna is an Operating Partner at Boldstart Ventures and joined the team in 2023.
Prior to joining boldstart, Anna worked at Snyk in London for over 6 years, leading the Platform group as Product Director. Before that, she was a freelance engineer, working with teams at GOV.UK, Mozilla, The Wellcome Trust and Code for America, speaking at dozens of events around the world on front-end best practices and browser technology. In 2017 she published the second edition of her book on Front-End Style Guides.
She loves helping companies level up their product processes – with frameworks to help them prioritise, systems to gather feedback, and tools to improve their collaboration internally and with customers.
Operating Partner, boldstart