How Pendo turns its “Bias to Act” value into internal tools shipped in hours on governed data

TL;DR

• Nearly 300 employees have built 1,400+ apps in five months, activating Pendo’s “Bias to Act” culture. Data teams maintain governance in Google BigQuery, while teams across People, Marketing, Sales, RevOps, and Customer Success use Lovable to build tools for their own workflows.
• A company kickoff event hub for 800 employees helped Pendo avoid up to $25,000 in software and agency costs. Built in a single weekend by VP of Employee Experience Trish LaPaglia, the app brought together schedules, dietary information, and live updates into one place, and gave her team back 10 to 15 hours each week.
• An interactive attendee hub replaced static pre-event emails for Pendo’s 2,000-person customer conference. Event Marketing Manager Gracie Bryant built the hub in about a week to replace a static email blast, reducing questions at the information desks by 30–50%.
• An account-health app called Customer Pulse became Pendo’s most-used tool built with Lovable. Customer success managers customized an initial build from Pendo’s Data and Go To Market Intelligence team to track health and renewal risk, generating 2,000 opens and 8,000 page views in its first 30 days.

People, marketing, and sales teams fix the problems they experience by building their own tools

Pendo helps companies understand and improve how people and AI agents use software through product analytics, user feedback, in-app guidance, and AI-powered tools.

One of Pendo’s core values is Bias to Act: When employees see a problem or something they want to improve, they’re encouraged to try to solve it. But turning those ideas into working tools still meant competing with more urgent priorities for time and technical resources.

For Pendo’s VP of Employee Experience, Trish LaPaglia, that constraint was about to change.

The People team replaces agency spend with an app built in a weekend

Every year, Pendo’s team of nearly 800 employees gathers at the Raleigh headquarters for company kickoff. As event plans evolved, Trish’s team had to update details and logistics across Google Docs, PDFs, Slack channels, and Confluence pages.

Trish’s team handled the administrative load by hand every year. Before using Lovable, it was just the cost of doing the job.

Then an ice storm cleared Trish’s calendar for a weekend. A few colleagues had mentioned Lovable, so she leaned into Pendo’s “Bias to Act” value and opened the platform to build an attendee hub for the upcoming company kickoff. Within 30 minutes, she was hooked.

Given the kickoff’s Après Ski theme and the snow falling outside her own window, Trish wondered if she could make it snow on the website, too. She asked Lovable, and snow fell on her screen.

“This was the most excited I had been about building in a long time,” Trish says. “It didn’t feel like work. It was just fun.”

What started with falling snow quickly turned into Pendo’s digital company-kickoff experience, bringing schedules, menus, event information, and updates into one place. The app gave hundreds of employees one place to turn for schedules, dietary needs, and logistics — and helped the company avoid a substantial investment in agency and event software costs.

Because the app lived inside Pendo’s approved workspace for an internal event, she had the freedom to experiment and iterate on her own timeline.

“I no longer needed permission to do any of those things that I imagined in my head,” says Trish. “If something needed fixing, I could update it instantaneously.”

In the run-up to the kickoff, Trish’s team reclaimed an estimated 10–15 hours each week that would have gone to manual updates and repetitive questions. When a menu changed, Trish had the update live in two minutes. Post-event follow-up usually takes days of coordination with web teams or outside agencies. Instead, Trish added session recordings, slide decks, and resources to the hub herself in just 40 minutes the afternoon the event wrapped.

Event marketing replaces pre-event emails with a live guide for 2,000+ attendees

During the company kickoff, Event Marketing Manager Gracie Bryant saw what Trish had built and immediately realized she could use Lovable to reinvent the attendee experience at Pendomonium, Pendo’s customer conference. Before the event, her team had relied heavily on a long “know before you go” email to share important details with the 2,000+ attendees. On site, signs and information desks filled in the gaps.

“You send the email and pray,” says Gracie. “You hope somebody reads it, you hope they know where to go, and you hope they read the millions of signs around.”

With Lovable, Gracie’s team replaced the static email blast with an interactive attendee hub containing the agenda, maps, event content, and personalized information. A project Gracie estimates would previously have taken months was ready in about a week. And as a result, Gracie estimated that the event’s information desks fielded 30–50% fewer attendee questions.

For years Gracie had wanted to help attendees navigate food allergies. Pendomonium has food vendors spread across indoor and outdoor spaces. For someone with a serious allergy, finding a safe meal could mean checking signs and asking vendors one by one. In about 30 minutes, Gracie built the first version of Munchomonium, a live food and allergy map that lets attendees find vending options to fit their needs.

When the forecast shifted right before the conference, Gracie added a live weather tracker in two days, a change that would previously have taken about a month.

“People have planned events the same way forever,” says Gracie. “Does that mean it’s right?”

GTM engineering cuts tool request turnaround from two weeks to same-day without moving warehouse data

Harrison Cozart, Senior GTM AI Engineer on Pendo’s Data and Go To Market Intelligence (DGTMI) team, built data analytics workflows and tools for go-to-market teams, but requests were piling up faster than the team could get to them.

“An adjustment might take me 30 seconds, but it’s going to take me a week to get to it because I have 100 other tickets,” he says.

Harrison used Lovable to create a governed way to give teams across the company more ownership without moving its underlying data. Pendo’s warehouse remains in BigQuery, where the data team created a Lovable-specific project and controls what data is available to the apps built from it.

“Lovable queries our semantic layer to write accurate, efficient queries on our users’ behalf, so we get speed without giving up governance,” says Harrison.

Pendo’s data team still owns how the company’s data is stored and accessed, but it’s no longer the bottleneck for every new view. Small changes that used to sit in Harrison’s queue for one to two weeks now happen the same day, giving his team back an estimated 5–10 engineering hours each week.

Sales, RevOps, and Customer Success take over the final build to ship tools they actually use

Harrison sets up the core data structure in BigQuery, builds the initial application, and hands it over so department teams can tailor the views, filters, and workflows to their daily work.

“The last 20% is often the hardest to get over the line because that’s where everyone has the most opinions,” says Harrison. “When the person with the opinions is the one making the changes, it fits, and they keep using it.”

One recent request for a marketing dashboard proved the value of the co-building model. Harrison sent a marketing leader a version that was about 80% complete and scheduled a meeting to work through the remaining changes. The next morning, the marketing leader canceled the meeting: She had opened the build and finished the changes herself.

For sales development, Harrison used this co-building approach to create a business development representative (BDR) Performance Command Center app. It gives sales managers one place to track pacing against quarterly targets and adjust views directly, without routing changes back through Harrison’s team.

The team used the same approach for a Customer Success account health app called Customer Pulse. The DGTMI team built the first version to bring account health data and churn risk into a single view. Pendo’s customer success managers shaped the rest around how they run their accounts. Customer Pulse is now Pendo’s most-used tool built with Lovable, with about 2,000 opens and 8,000 page views in its first 30 days.

From one weekend experiment to a company-wide building culture

In August, Pendo ran a company-wide Lovable hackathon. More than 120 employees took part, producing 65 apps in about three hours. For 58 of those employees, it was the first app they had ever built.

The hackathon reflects a much broader shift already underway. In five months, nearly 300 Pendo employees have built 1,400+ apps to improve everything from workflows to customer experiences. What started with one person building a better way to run the company kickoff has spread across People, Marketing, Sales & RevOps, and Customer Success. With Lovable, the people closest to a problem can now solve it themselves.

“Bias to Act has always been one of our core values, but Lovable gave people the tools to actually live it,” says Trish. “And everyone here is having the same thought I had: Maybe I can just build it myself.”