The “Discuss Employee Spotlight” is a Q&A series dedicated to showcasing all of the amazing talent at Discuss.
For this month’s profile, we talked with Jim Longo, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, who started Discuss in 2013 and is based out of New Orleans, LA.
- Tell our readers a little bit about your role at Discuss.
I am the co-founder here at Discuss, currently serving as the Chief Strategy Officer. In this role, I am responsible for defining the strategic direction of the business. Additionally, I serve as the chief subject matter expert, drawing from my over 25 years of experience in advising and selling digital qualitative research. - Which of Discuss’ core values are you most inspired by? (Empathize, Collaborate, Obsess, Out Innovate, Excel)
Empathy played a crucial role in the development of the Discuss platform. In 2013, when we decided to create a video-centric qualitative platform, I personally reached out to 100 qualitative research buyers. I asked them why they were not conducting more online qualitative research. These conversations provided me with valuable insights into the primary challenges associated with setting up online sessions. Armed with this empathy, our goal was to eliminate or, at the very least, reduce the obstacles in initiating and managing a qualitative project. Our primary focus was on streamlining the process of conducting analysis, with an emphasis on saving time.
The outcome is the research-oriented, purpose-built platform you see today. This platform empowers you to set up and run sessions at the speed you require, facilitating faster decision-making. We maintain a strong commitment to our customers and maintain regular communication with them. We continually enhance our platform by incorporating new features and functionalities based on their feedback. So empathy is really still at the core of everything we do and it’s helped us maintain our north star of building a platform that’s solving the biggest challenges in scaling qual research. - Tell us about your team and the mindset (and approach) you’re instilling.
Now more than ever, brands are seeking to conduct their research faster, more efficiently, and cost-effectively, all without compromising on quality. As mentioned earlier, our mindset is focused on reducing the obstacles involved in setting up, managing, and gleaning in-depth insights from qualitative sessions – whether live or asynchronous. I’m so proud to see us now have a truly global organization that has this mindset – from our customer support team to our product team, engineering team, customer success and every team across the organization. This mindset has helped us successfully grow and also helped us to be the first (and fastest) mover in the generative AI space because we have a team of people here who saw the massive potential that generative AI has across all areas of qualitative research. - What project or initiative are you most proud of at Discuss?
We have recently refined and further focused our innovation strategy to specifically target some of the unique needs and challenges of brands as they try to scale in-depth research across their organizations. As part of this initiative, we’re taking a comprehensive approach to integrate generative AI across all areas of the qualitative research lifecycle and have built integrations with key technologies across the research ecosystem, thereby enhancing the entire qualitative research process.
Essentially I look at this as Next Gen Discuss, and really it represents the next wave of both market research and our business, which is truly exciting to me as co-founder. This initiative promises significant return on ROI for all our customers and offers substantial potential for larger brands looking to increase efficiency and reduce the time and costs that have historically discouraged them from conducting more qualitative research. More to come on this soon! - What is something unique about you (a fun fact) that few people know about?
I grew up in New Orleans, the birthplace of Jazz. Music is at the core of my being, as it has the power to unite people and allows us a temporary escape from our daily lives, allowing us to return with a refreshed perspective. That being said, I attend more than 50 live music events every year.
