How Digital Agriculture Services turned a survey into a coaching conversation
DAS wanted more than a rating from its technical team. With Hoogly, the whole team joined in and managers now use it to coach and plan careers.
A rating scale gives you a number, but not always the reason behind it. Digital Agriculture Services (DAS), the location intelligence company founded in 2017 with CSIRO as its founding equity partner, wanted to understand its engineers, data engineers and data scientists in more depth, in a way that felt like being heard and not like paperwork. Its first Hoogly survey drew strong participation across the whole team, and the insights are now changing how managers coach their people.
| Company | Digital Agriculture Services |
| Industry | Agriculture technology and location intelligence |
| Founded | 2017, in partnership with CSIRO |
| Team | Engineers, data engineers, software engineers and data scientists |
| Challenge | A technical team that deserves more depth than a rating scale can give |
| Solution | Conversational listening with Hoogly, extended to managers as an ongoing coaching tool |
| Results | Strong participation, richer insight, and deeper career development conversations |
Challenge
Jenny McMaster, Head of Operations at DAS, first came across Hoogly at the Startup People Summit in 2025. She talks often about how AI can be applied meaningfully in the workplace, and Hoogly stood out as one of the most practical and well-considered uses she had seen.
She also knew how her own team would respond. DAS is full of engineers, data engineers, software engineers and data scientists, and she expected a conversational approach to suit them far better than a standard survey.
A traditional survey can feel a little bit like a compliance exercise.
Solution
Hoogly replaces the form with a conversation. Instead of ticking boxes or giving a rating, people talk about their work and the platform draws out what matters.
“Hoogly’s conversational style really made the team feel like they were being heard,” Jenny says. “We got much more valuable information rather than just checking boxes or giving a rating.”
DAS ran a baseline survey first and is now preparing its second. It is also encouraging managers to use Hoogly day to day, as an ongoing coaching tool and not only as a way to measure the team.
Results
Participation in the baseline survey was exceptional, well beyond what most teams see from a survey. For a team that values depth over box-ticking, that matters.
The biggest shift has been at manager level. The insights give managers something concrete to work with, and Jenny says they have helped them hold more meaningful career development conversations with their reports.
That’s been a real shift for us.
The endorsement that landed hardest came from DAS’s head of engineering, who is not easily impressed by technology or AI. He told Jenny it was one of the best uses of AI he had seen in practice.
Jenny’s advice to anyone weighing it up: “If you’re looking to build a more honest feedback culture within your organisation, I would definitely recommend considering Hoogly.”