Netlify People Team Builds Custom HR Tools Without Engineering Background.

Kelly Poplaski, an HRBP Director at Netlify, built a comprehensive employee sentiment survey tool from scratch. She's not an engineer, but she noticed her team was paying for multiple tools that didn't quite fit their needs.

The project started with a simple question: what if the People Team could build exactly what they wanted instead of adapting to third-party limitations?

Poplaski's first project was a 4-week psychological safety learning series, a self-serve internal tool designed to extend the impact of a single workshop. Leaders could access the materials on their own schedule, turning a one-time event into an ongoing resource.

The success of that initial tool gave her confidence to tackle something more complex: a full employee sentiment survey platform. The system includes an employee-facing survey interface and an admin backend for deeper data analysis, allowing HR and leadership to dig into trends and correlations that off-the-shelf tools couldn't surface.

Building at this scale pushed Poplaski out of her comfort zone, but in a productive way. She pulled in product managers, engineers, and leaders across IT, Security, and R&D. What began as an HR side project evolved into a company-wide collaboration, with stakeholders from multiple departments weighing in on requirements and security considerations.

The sentiment survey tool went live last quarter. Leadership now uses the insights across the organization, and Poplaski spends her time analyzing what the data reveals rather than wrestling with vendor limitations or waiting for feature requests to be prioritized.

Netlify has been highlighting internal builders lately. The company recently published a blog post about the People Team's custom software success, positioning it as part of a broader trend they're calling "vibe coding." The term refers to non-engineers building functional software to solve real problems, often using AI-assisted tools and modern frameworks.

The story fits into Netlify's larger narrative around developer experience and lowering barriers to building on the web. If an HR director can ship production tools that serve the entire company, the platform is working as intended.

While Netlify showcases internal innovation, the platform itself keeps evolving. Recent updates include a new credits display system that shows available credits upfront rather than requiring users to calculate remaining balance, and native support for Astro 6 on day one of its release.

The company also recently announced it's sponsoring npmx.dev, a JavaScript package discovery tool, and added Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite to its AI Gateway preview.

For teams evaluating whether to build custom internal tools or rely on vendor solutions, Poplaski's experience offers a data point: sometimes the build option is faster, cheaper, and more tailored than the alternative, especially when you have a platform that handles deployment and infrastructure.