Lattice

It is review season again. This time nobody is hiding.

Somewhere right now, a manager opens a tab, and instead of a blank document and a sinking feeling, there's a draft. Last quarter's goals, the praise that piled up in Slack, the two 1:1s that went sideways, all already pulled together. The manager edits rather than invents. That tab is Lattice, and across more than four thousand companies, this is the quiet thing it does: it makes the most avoided conversation in corporate life slightly less avoidable.

Lattice sells performance management, goals, engagement surveys, career growth, compensation reviews, and people analytics, all stitched into one platform. The unglamorous pitch: good management can be a product, not a personality trait. A decade in, that pitch is worth roughly three billion dollars.

Companies kept saying people were their greatest asset. Then they managed them with a spreadsheet.

Back in 2015, the tooling for managing humans at work was a museum of dread. Annual reviews lived in Word documents emailed once a year. Goals were set in January and never looked at again. Feedback happened, if at all, in the hallway. Engagement was a survey HR ran, panicked over, and filed away. The data that mattered most - whether people were growing, struggling, or quietly drafting their resignation - was scattered across systems that didn't talk to each other.

The irony was hard to miss. The same companies that A/B tested button colors to three decimal places were running their most important relationship, the one with their own employees, on instinct and Google Docs. Software had eaten sales, marketing, finance, and engineering. It had politely declined to eat HR.

Two engineers from a T-shirt company decided management was an engineering problem.

Jack Altman and Eric Koslow met as engineers at Teespring, the custom-apparel startup. Altman had taken the long road - investment banking at Gleacher, an economics degree from Princeton, then a VP role on the business side - while Koslow ran engineering. In 2015 they left to build Lattice. Their wager was specific: if you give managers a system that makes feedback continuous, goals visible, and reviews bearable, you don't just digitize HR paperwork. You change how companies actually run.

It was a contrarian bet at the time. Investors had been burned by HR software that companies bought and employees ignored. Altman's answer was to obsess over the part most vendors treated as an afterthought: whether people would willingly open the thing. (His brother, Sam, was off making a different bet on the future of work entirely. The Altman dinner table presumably had range.)

FILED UNDER: Sibling rivalry, productively channeled. One Altman builds the model that writes your review. The other builds the place you read it.

Six modules, one premise: management is a workflow, so treat it like one.

Lattice started with performance reviews and kept adding the things that orbit them. Today the platform connects performance, goals, engagement, growth, compensation, and analytics, and it does the work where people already are - prompting feedback and reviews inside Slack, Teams, Gmail, and Outlook rather than asking anyone to log into yet another portal.

In 2025 the company put AI at the center, with an assistant that drafts reviews, surfaces the employee who's quietly checked out, and coaches managers in the moment. Notably, Lattice is also subtracting: it began winding down its HRIS and payroll modules to refocus on the performance work it's known for. Doing fewer things, on purpose, is rarer in software than it should be.

The numbers care about employees too.

A company that sells software for managing people is held to an awkward standard: it has to be good at the thing it sells. By the public markers, Lattice has earned the benefit of the doubt. Thousands of organizations run their cycles on it, recurring revenue reached an estimated $127 million, and G2's reviewers keep voting it onto the best-of lists. None of that is the same as loved, but it's a long way from ignored - which, for HR software, is the usual fate.

CASE IN POINT: Slack uses Lattice and integrates with it. The performance review now lives inside the same app where you send the crying-laughing emoji. Range, indeed.

Make work meaningful - and learn, fast, what that does not mean.

Lattice's stated mission is to make work meaningful by helping companies build engaged, high-performing teams. Pleasant enough to fit on a wall. The harder test came in July 2024, when the company announced it would give AI "digital workers" their own employee records and a spot on the org chart. The HR world responded in roughly 72 hours, and the verdict was loud: treating bots like colleagues, critics argued, disrespects the humans you already employ.

Lattice killed the feature within days. CEO Sarah Franklin later called it a misunderstanding, but the more interesting fact is the speed of the retreat. A company that builds tools for human dignity at work tested the boundary of that idea in public, got told it had crossed the line, and stepped back before the launch had cooled. For a mission statement, "we listened" is harder to fake than "we care."

AI can draft the review. It still can't have the conversation.

The next decade of work will be argued over exactly where Lattice sits: the seam between what software decides and what a manager says out loud. AI can already summarize a quarter, spot the disengaged, and write the first draft of feedback. What it can't do is sit across from a person and tell them the truth in a way that helps. Lattice's bet for tomorrow is that the draft is the easy part and the conversation is the product.

Under Franklin, the company is pushing AI deeper into the manager's workflow while - publicly, expensively - refusing to let it replace the manager. That's a narrow path. Lean too far toward automation and you get the org-chart fiasco again. Lean too far away and you're a prettier version of the Word document from 2015. The whole game is staying on the line.

Which brings us back to that open tab. The manager finishes editing the draft, closes the laptop, and walks over to have the actual conversation - the one no software will ever have for them. A decade ago, that conversation happened once a year, badly, if at all. Now it happens because a piece of software made the avoidable harder to avoid. That is a smaller revolution than the one promised on the homepage. It is also a real one.