IT Engineer Andre Williams was used to formal, long-winded proposal processes when suggesting changes to a company’s technical architecture.
Then he joined DISQO.
At audience insights platform DISQO, Williams was introduced to a request for comments practice that encourages all engineering and product employees to propose system, workflow and tech changes in a collaborative document.
“Technology is moving fast. There are new tools constantly coming out,” Williams said. “Our RFC process allows us to be at the forefront of these decisions, have a strong stance on what we implement and move swiftly.”
Williams, for example, proposed an RFC for infrastructure adjustments a month after starting at DISQO in February. By June, the team had begun actively building Williams’ changes.
Our RFC process allows us to be at the forefront of these decisions, have a strong stance on what we implement and move swiftly.”
DISQO’s candor isn’t limited to its internal team either.
VP of Talent Acquisition Rafi Kurkdjian said transparency is both a core value of the business, as well as a founding principle of their consumer insights product and platform that invites participants to openly share their data in exchange for rewards.
“From the onset, we said we’re going to make a transparent offer to our members,” Kurkdjian said.
Built In talked with Williams, Kurkdjian and Senior Director of Talent Acquisition Michael Jin to learn how transparency led DISQO through its past and the role it will play as the company continues to scale at a key time in the consumer insights sector.
Time to be open
DISQO began growing its 100 percent first-party consumer panel, Survey Junkie, in 2015 with a simple value proposition. Members earn points in exchange for sharing their thoughts about products, services and brands and are further incentivized to reveal their online habits such as media consumption and shopping.
Over the lifetime of the panel, more than 20 million people have participated. Their data has helped inform market strategy for brands, market researchers, publishers and agencies.
“In six years, we’ve built one of the largest voluntary, first-party consumer panels,” Kurkdjian said.
That’s especially valuable as the practice of using online identifiers such as third-party cookies are phased out in response to a rising tide of privacy regulations in the U.S. and globally.
“Companies in our space are having to start from scratch to figure out how to gather insights about consumers’ online behaviors without cookies,” said Kurkdjian. “We’ve been building a voluntary, opt-in platform to do that from the beginning.”
The $90 billion consumer insights industry is being shaken up, and DISQO is a serious provocateur.
“We’re disrupting a big industry in an ethical, permission-based way,” said Jin. “That gets me excited.”
We’re disrupting a big industry in an ethical, permission-based way.”
Technically transparent
While gathering data in a way that is more sustainable given advancing privacy laws lends them a leg up, that’s not DISQO's only differentiator. The company also leans on the latest tech and a culture that embraces change to meet this moment.
“We’re revolutionizing the way that market research and consumer insights have traditionally been operating,” Kurkdjian said. “A lot of that is done because of our tech stack. We’re an agile team and we leverage the best tools. We’re not shy to use the newest technologies.”
When it comes to trying out new tools, the team leans on RFCs to facilitate the decision-making process.
“If we want to move from spinning up instances in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, we have processes that make it clear for anyone who wants to be part of the process and get involved,” Williams said.
RFC FOR SYSTEMATIC CHANGE
Setting up guilds within the tech organization is also common practice, which Williams said helps create visibility into projects across DISQO and a space to share insights and demos of their work.
“This lets us showboat and gather feedback,” Williams said.
One example of this is Williams developing a proof of concept for a tool called Atlantis, which will provide additional open-source capabilities that allow the use of Terraform in GitLab, DISQO’s code repository.
“We use GitLab here and Atlantis will allow us to do all of our Terraforming on the repo level outside of the local machine and onto a shared platform that anybody can access.”
He hopes to demo Atlantis to the team in the coming weeks.
From leadership down
When Jin joined DISQO six months ago, he was taken back by how accessible, responsive and supportive the executive team has been.
“Recruiting is a priority, and we talk about it regularly,” Jin said. “We’ve welcomed over 100 new hires since I’ve started, and the three co-founders have entrusted me to run with my ideas on how to find the best talent. It’s refreshing.”
DISQO’S GROWTH
- More than 20 million people have participated in the company’s audience panel since 2015
- Finished 2020 with 185 employees and a goal to reach 350 employees by end of 2021
- Moved their HQ to a larger location in Glendale and expanded its office in Yerevan, Armenia
- As of June, DISQO surpassed 310 employees
Leadership’s unified front and display of transparency has allowed the company to adapt in a rapidly changing industry.
For engineers, this means immediate answers to questions that could slow down projects.
“Our CTO Drew Kutcharian is here daily,” Williams said. “If I get held up on legacy or historical information, I can Slack him or schedule time on his calendar. Usually this information is buried away at a company, but at DISQO I can get clarity quickly.”
Additionally, to keep everyone aligned during pivotal growth, Kurkdjian said DISQO leaders have communicated every report, metric and data point at companywide meetings and created objectives and key results that are shared across departments.
“That’s helped us scale and keep everyone marching toward the same goal,” Kurkdjian said
