We’re All Builders Now: Why HR Should Stop Shopping and Start Shipping
Why the Future of People Ops isn’t about buying your way to solutions
Andrew Golden had a problem. (Actually, being privileged to know him over the last few years, I’m sure he’s working on solving about forty-seven problems at any given time.) But for the sake of today’s post, the one that was making his life particularly annoying was this: he needed to understand what was actually happening with his employees. Not in the “send an annual survey and hope for the best” way. In a proper, nuanced, timely way that could actually inform decisions.
The classic path would be to buy an employee engagement platform. Research vendors. Sit through demos. Build a business case. Wait for budget approval. Maybe launch something in Q3 (if you’re lucky).
Instead, Andrew built it himself. In two weeks. Using Replit, a tool that’s costs are small, but they’re diminished even more by the minimal time investment required to get up and running.
Andrew isn’t a technical leader who accidentally ended up in HR. He studied psychology at university. His first job out of college was selling promotional pens door-to-door in San Francisco. He is not a developer. He’s just someone who got tired of waiting for perfect solutions that didn’t seem to come.
But what really makes Andrew impressive to me is that he stopped asking for permission and started building things.
And that’s really the entire point of this piece I’m writing about today, and it’s kind of the point of almost everything I advocate for in Built for People. So let’s dig in…
The Problem with “Strategic HR”
I’ve spent the last decade obsessing over making HR more strategic. Learn the business model. Understand the P&L. Speak the language of the C-suite. Get that coveted seat at the table.
All good advice. All completely necessary. And yet, entirely insufficient on its own. The word “built” is in “built for people” on purpose. You can know every line item in the budget, attend every board meeting, speak fluent finance, and still be seen as fundamentally administrative if the only thing you do when problems emerge is... schedule meetings about them, or purchase more tools to be implemented.
It’s a troubling cycle that seems to have emerged in the last decade or so where a leader identifies a real problem (and, if I’m frank, this is a HR problem as much as it is a Finance one, Customer Success, or Marketing)... the problem statement is well written, it’s something that’s genuinely costing the business money or making employees miserable. They present it effectively to leadership. Everyone nods. Everyone agrees it’s important and must be solved. Then what happens?
Six months of vendor demos. An RFP process using those god awful procurement spreadsheets (I’m sorry but please). A committee is ‘spun up’ to evaluate solutions. A budget request that gets pushed to next quarter, “once revenue picks up”. Meanwhile, the problem is still there, still costing money, still making people miserable.
Often this is what passes for strategic HR work.
I often get feedback that I’m still very ‘hands on’, because I spend time using Zapier, Sana, or Claude. It’s because I think that strategy also involves knowing how to (not always necessarily being the individual to do the full programme of work), but knowing how to direct a team to build the thing that solves the problem. This month. This week. Today, if you can!
As Andrew puts it: “Stop trying to be a consultant and go get in the business and sit side by side and build things and fix things with people.”
That’s the work. Not the decks. Not the vendor evaluations. Not the perfectly formatted business cases that live in shared drives nobody opens. The actual building of actual solutions to actual problems.
How We Got Here (And Why It’s Changing)
For years, HR teams have been stuck in a specific pattern when it comes to solving problems:
