Bugcrowd knows that the secret sauce to building an amazing platform is deeply understanding and continuously enhancing the hacker experience. After all, Bugcrowd wouldn’t be what it is today without the hacker community, and we want to help you level up, optimize your skills, and, of course, have fun along the way.
One of the most effective ways we gather feedback from our hacker community is through our quarterly Hacker Experience Surveys. These surveys provide hackers a direct line of communication with the Bugcrowd team. The feedback and results from these surveys unlock key insights that help us understand exactly what’s working—and what’s not working—for hackers. In this post, I’ll take you behind the scenes of the survey process, explaining what the surveys are, why they matter, and how we strive to turn your feedback into meaningful improvements in the hacker experience.
What are Hacker Experience Surveys?
Just like you, we’re always hunting for vulnerabilities—except in our case, vulnerabilities look like areas of improvement in our platform from the POV of users: hackers.
Our quarterly Hacker Experience Surveys are short, focused questionnaires sent to different cohorts of our hacker community every three months. These surveys cover a variety of topics, including:
- Platform usability
- Reward structures
- Engagements
- Experience with our Support and Triage teams
- New features
- Platform enhancements.
Our goal is to empower hackers to drive progress within Bugcrowd.
We keep things simple and respect your time. Each survey is designed to be quick and easy to complete—we ask no more than 10 questions each time. Despite the brief nature of the survey, your responses have a huge impact. They give us valuable insights that help us patch issues and deploy features that make the Bugcrowd platform even better for hackers.
Why do we conduct Hacker Experience Surveys?
It’s simple—we care about your experience with us.
Beyond that, these surveys are crucial to our commitment to making Bugcrowd not only functional and valuable for the broader cybersecurity space but also genuinely hacker-centric. By gathering your feedback regularly, we’re able to understand your pain points, gauge your thoughts on new proposed platform features and enhancements, and track our progress to ensure we stay on track with the things that matter most to you.
Your feedback doesn’t just sit in a spreadsheet—it drives real action, helping us achieve a lot of important things, including:
- Building trust: By continuously listening and taking action on your feedback, we hope to prove that we are dedicated to improving your experience and that your voice truly matters here at Bugcrowd.
- Prioritizing improvements: Rather than us just guessing as to what you want, you tell us what to focus on so we can implement changes that have the greatest impact on your experience.
- Strengthening our community: We want to foster a sense of collaboration and partnerships that benefit everyone at Bugcrowd and across the industry. As such, we want everyone in the Bugcrowd community to feel heard and seen—we want to prove that your feedback leads to real changes.
What does the survey process look like?
We keep the survey process simple, transparent, and easy to understand. Here’s how it works:
- Survey design: Each quarter, the Hacker Success Team collaborates with different teams across Bugcrowd, including Product, Support, Triage, Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Success, to design questions that reflect our current priorities and challenges. We always leave space for open-ended feedback, so you can share any thoughts that don’t fit into a set response format.
- Survey distribution: We reach out to hackers of different experience levels, backgrounds, skills, and geographic locations to ensure we capture a well-rounded perspective and give everyone a chance to provide feedback. Each quarter, we focus on specific groups of hackers (e.g., newcomers, highly engaged hackers, or those who haven’t earned rewards yet).
- Incentives: Your time is valuable. We always offer financial incentives to make your contributions worthwhile. For each survey, we hold random drawings for different cash prizes (recently, we gave out five $100 USD cash prizes for a total of $500!). These prizes are distributed randomly, so everyone who completes a survey has an equal chance of winning.
- Survey completion: Hackers usually have a period of six weeks to complete a survey. We aim for quick turnarounds to keep the process engaging and easy.
- Review and action: Once the responses are in, our team analyzes every piece of data we receive. We look for trends, common themes, key stats, and specific areas where we can improve. From there, we prioritize actions based on the urgency and potential impact of the shared feedback.
What happens after the survey process has been completed?
While gathering your feedback is critical, the real magic lies in what we do with it.
After the survey closes, we dig into the data to identify trends, patterns, and key takeaways, reviewing both quantitative scores (e.g., “On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Bugcrowd to other hackers you know?”) and qualitative responses (e.g., “What is the top challenge you currently face as a hacker?”). We also consider how different groups of hackers respond to our questions to make sure we are meeting the needs of everyone on our platform, from newcomers to seasoned pros or hobbyists to career hackers.
Then, we share everything we learn with various teams across Bugcrowd, including our Executive Leadership Team, because every member is heavily invested in the hacker experience and how we respond to feedback. Additionally, starting this month, we’ll be sharing a public Hacker Experience Digest as a blog post each quarter. These will be short, quick reads packed with insights on how your feedback is shaping the platform.
Lastly, we collaborate cross-functionally with several teams, often Engineering, Product, and Support, to come up with a game plan on how we will make improvements to the platform. And, the proof is in the pudding: Feedback from previous surveys has already helped us refine processes and enhance platform performance such as a revamped Discord and improved competitions to level up hacker skills.
Also, rest assured that your privacy is really important to us. While our surveys do collect usernames for possible follow-up, all responses are completely anonymous to anyone who isn’t analyzing the data. We want you to always feel comfortable providing honest feedback. When we do share survey findings outside of analysis, we protect your identity by ensuring all feedback is aggregated and anonymized.
How can you participate?
If you’re a hacker who works with Bugcrowd, you’re already part of the conversation! But if you want to get more involved, here’s what you can do:
- Stay active: The more engaged you are on our platform, the more likely it is that you will be eligible for a survey based on our cohort selection criteria. Regular participation can look like submissions, collaborations, event participation, community interactions, and more.
- Complete the surveys: When a survey pops into your inbox, please take a few minutes to complete it. Your feedback is really important, and we read every single response.
- Connect with us: We also want to know your thoughts on how we’re gathering feedback. If you have thoughts or ideas on how we can improve our surveys, feel free to share them in our community forums (like in our Discord server!), reply to our survey outreach email, or add an open comment on your next survey.
Please note: Not every hacker will be selected for every survey, as selection varies based on a range of factors and is sometimes due to random chance. Additionally, some hackers may not be eligible to participate due to specific platform guidelines, such as account status.
A heartfelt thank you to our hackers
Before we wrap this up, we want to express our gratitude to each of you for your ongoing involvement and support. Whether you’ve been doing this for years or are just starting out, your contributions—whether through surveys, submissions, event participation, or community involvement—are vital to our growth and improvement.
The Bugcrowd community is filled with talented people, and we’re proud to work alongside you. Your perspective is invaluable, and we promise to keep listening and evolving to ensure Bugcrowd remains a space where hackers like you can thrive!
Thank you for being such a vital part of our journey—we’re excited about what lies ahead and can’t wait to keep growing alongside you! 🧡
