She left a President's office at Salesforce to run a 530-person HR startup. The bet: that AI, handled right, makes work more human.
- Look at this engineer who learned to sell software, then learned to sell the future of work. -
Sarah Franklin took the Lattice job on January 2, 2024, a Tuesday, a calendar date most CEOs would avoid. She did it anyway. Jack Altman moved to Executive Chairman, handed her a $3 billion company in the middle of HR tech's noisiest year, and stepped back to let her do something he believed only she could do: refound the category around AI without breaking the part that matters - the people.
Her CV reads like a Salesforce keynote. Fifteen-plus years at the company. Built Trailhead with a team that turned a learning portal into a movement and an astronaut named Astro into a beloved mascot. Ran developer relations. Took over the platform business. Then marketing. Then the title President & CMO. Each promotion looked inevitable in retrospect, the way these things always do.
What's less inevitable: a Virginia Tech chemical engineer and biochemist deciding that the most interesting unsolved problem in software wasn't another developer platform. It was the thing companies still measure with surveys and dread - how people work, why they stay, who's helping them grow. Lattice already had the data layer. She had the operator chops to make it matter at scale.
Start in Richmond, Virginia, where Sarah Joyce Franklin grew up. The path through high school chemistry and into Virginia Tech's chemical engineering program does not, on paper, point toward enterprise software. She picked up biochemistry along the way, because one rigorous discipline apparently wasn't enough, and she worked as an engineer before pivoting toward technology. By the time she landed at Salesforce in 2008, the company was a teenager in startup years. Marc Benioff was already a known force. The cloud was still, charmingly, a contested idea.
The thing about people who stay fifteen years at one company isn't usually the loyalty. It's the appetite for new problems inside the same walls. Sarah went from developer initiatives to running Trailhead, the learning platform that turned dry CRM training into a gamified universe with mascots, badges, and a community that called themselves Trailblazers without irony. Trailhead worked because it took the dullest part of enterprise software - learning the thing - and gave it a story arc. That instinct, the editorial instinct about what work feels like, would carry through everything she did next.
Promoted to EVP and General Manager of Platform, Trailhead, and AppExchange in 2020. CMO in 2021. President in 2023. Three job changes in three years, each one a different way to look at the same question: how do you make a complicated thing feel inevitable to the people who use it? Forbes put her on its list of Most Influential CMOs. Business Insider called her a CMO to Watch. Adweek gave her the Brand Genius Award. The trophies stacked up. So did the headcount under her org chart.
And then she left.
Jack Altman, who founded Lattice in 2015, did something rare in venture-backed tech: he stepped sideways. He moved to Executive Chairman, told the world he wanted to spend more time investing through Alt Capital, and handed Sarah the CEO role on January 2, 2024. The official Lattice blog called it "The Next Chapter." Altman wrote that she "oozes compassion, integrity, and joy" and described her confidence as the kind "that only comes from deep experience and success." That is a generous way of saying: she's done this before, and we trust her with the cultural keys.
The timing was, to put it mildly, interesting. Lattice was navigating one of the loudest debates in HR Twitter history - questions about how AI should fit into employee records, and what it means to treat an AI agent like a coworker. Sarah inherited the conversation. Her response was to reframe it. The Lattice that emerged under her watch is not the company that wants to give AI employee IDs. It's the company arguing, in every keynote, that AI should make people better at the parts of work that are most human: feedback, growth, recognition, coaching.
Lattice sells performance management, engagement surveys, OKRs, 1:1 tooling, compensation review, and an increasingly opinionated set of AI features that sit on top of all of it. Customers are growth-stage and enterprise companies that need HR to be more than a clipboard. The technology stack is unsurprising in the modern way - React, GraphQL, TypeScript, Postgres, Kubernetes, plus Anthropic Claude and a LangGraph pipeline doing the AI heavy lifting. The interesting part is not the architecture. It's the editorial line Sarah draws around what the AI is for.
She talks about Lattice as a coach in your pocket - one that has context on your goals, your peers, your feedback history, your last quarter's review - and shows up at the moments when you actually need help, not just at the cyclical review windows HR teams have always dreaded. The argument is that AI flattens the pyramid. Entry-level employees and the C-suite, she told Fortune in June 2025, increasingly know the same things. The hierarchy people thought was based on knowledge turns out to have been based on access. AI redistributes access. HR is the function best positioned to manage what comes next.
Sarah's public talks tend to circle the same three asks. One: build AI for the success of people, not the success of the model. Two: keep human checks and balances on every AI workflow that touches someone's career. Three: stop treating HR like the after-thought department. The CHRO, she argues, is the one squarely responsible for people - and people, for now, are still the entire point.
It is not subtle messaging. It is also not random. Lattice's competitive moat depends on customers believing that the company's AI is the safe kind of AI - the kind that augments managers rather than replacing them, that empowers employees rather than surveilling them. Sarah's worldview and Lattice's positioning are, conveniently, the same thing.
In December 2024, PagerDuty appointed her to its Board of Directors. A nice piece of synergy - one company that helps you with people, another that helps you when systems break. Her week now includes performance reviews and incident reviews. She also keeps a public presence as a speaker, with appearances at SXSW London in 2025 and a regular slot at Lattiverse, Lattice's own customer conference.
The part that doesn't make the press release: Sarah took over a company in the year HR tech got loud. The Lattice she runs in 2026 is not the Lattice that Jack Altman handed her. The product roadmap pivoted. The messaging tightened. The conversation moved from "performance management software" to "the people platform for the AI era." That kind of repositioning, done in 24 months, is the kind of operator move that earns chemical engineers their second career.
She still has the engineer's habit of describing problems in systems language. She still has the marketer's ear for what a sentence has to do. And she still has the Salesforce alum's instinct to build a category around a community, not the other way around. Lattiverse, after all, looks suspiciously like a Dreamforce starter kit. That is not an accusation. That is a compliment.
Approximate. Width reflects relative tenure.
Sources include Lattice.com, Fortune, TechCrunch, ERE, Diginomica, BusinessWire, Amplitude, The Letter Two, and Lattice's own keynote transcripts. Facts cross-checked against public interviews and press releases as of May 2026.