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Lattice: The Performance Platform That Grows With Mid-Market Teams

The Challenge

For HR leaders at companies between 100 and 500 employees, there's a familiar inflection point: the moment when spreadsheets, Google Forms, and scattered feedback tools stop scaling. Performance reviews become administrative nightmares. Goals live in one system, engagement surveys in another, and compensation planning in yet another. The result is fragmented data, inconsistent manager practices, and an HR team spending more time wrangling tools than actually developing people.

This matters because mid-market companies compete on talent just like enterprises do, but often without dedicated HR operations staff or six-figure software budgets. They need systems that bring structure without bureaucracy—platforms that help managers become better coaches rather than just better administrators. That's the gap Lattice was built to address.

How Lattice Approaches It

Lattice combines performance management, employee engagement surveys, goal tracking, career development, and compensation planning into a single connected platform. Founded in 2015 by Jack Altman and Eric Koslow after experiencing broken feedback processes at a prior startup, the company now serves over 5,000 organizations including Slack, Reddit, Figma, and Cruise.

The core philosophy is that these HR functions shouldn't live in silos. When goals inform performance reviews, and engagement data surfaces alongside performance ratings, HR teams get a more complete picture of their workforce. Managers can see their team's engagement scores, goal progress, and development plans in one dashboard rather than toggling between disconnected tools. This integration is Lattice's primary differentiator—few competitors offer the same breadth with genuine data connectivity across modules.

The platform has invested heavily in AI capabilities over the past year. A Writing Assist feature helps managers draft review feedback faster, with one customer at Figma reporting that downward reviews dropped from over an hour to about thirty minutes without losing authenticity. An AI Agent acts as an always-on HR resource, answering employee questions about policies and surfacing insights for HR teams from across the platform's data. Engagement surveys now include automatic theme extraction from open-text responses, turning qualitative feedback into actionable patterns without manual coding.

What distinguishes Lattice's approach is its emphasis on continuous feedback rather than annual review theater. The platform includes tools for weekly check-ins, real-time praise, and structured one-on-one meeting agendas—all included with the base subscription. These aren't afterthoughts bolted onto a review system; they're positioned as the foundation for building a feedback culture where formal reviews become summaries of ongoing conversations rather than anxiety-inducing annual events.

Who It's Built For

Lattice works best for companies that have outgrown informal HR processes and want to professionalize their people operations. The typical customer is a Series B or C company crossing 100 employees, often with a first-time Head of People or HR Business Partner who needs to establish consistent practices across a growing organization. Tech companies were early adopters, but the customer base now spans financial services, biotech, professional services, and other knowledge-economy sectors where talent management directly affects business outcomes.

Signs you're ready for Lattice include: managers running reviews inconsistently (or not at all), goals scattered across Notion docs and spreadsheets with no visibility, or engagement being measured through informal pulse checks that never turn into action plans. If your HR team spends more time administering processes than improving them, that's the gap Lattice is designed to close. Companies with primarily hourly or frontline workforces, or those under 50 employees, typically find the platform more robust than their current needs require.

What Customers Are Saying

Customer evidence points to concrete operational improvements. GoCardless, a fintech company with roughly 500 employees, saw performance review completion jump from 62% to 100% after implementing Lattice—their Chief People Officer noted that the platform "feels like it was made for us" given its focus on high-performance culture. Weave, a communications technology company, reported saving 30 hours per engagement survey cycle through Lattice's automated analytics and reporting capabilities. Their Head of People Ops specifically praised Lattice's responsiveness to customer feedback: "Our suggestions end up on the roadmap. It's not a stale platform, which is really nice."

LiveRamp's experience illustrates the user adoption advantage. The data connectivity company layered Lattice on top of Workday for performance and one-on-one tracking, achieving a 3.5x higher manager check-in completion rate than they'd seen with Workday's native tools. For mid-market companies evaluating whether specialized tools justify the added vendor relationship, that kind of adoption differential matters. Vantage West Credit Union tied Lattice usage to a 27% reduction in employee attrition after a year—the kind of business outcome that makes the investment case straightforward.

Getting Started

Lattice prices on a per-seat, per-month basis with annual billing. The base platform runs approximately $11 per user monthly, with add-on modules for engagement surveys ($4), career development ($4), and compensation management ($6). A $4,000 annual minimum means the platform effectively targets organizations with 30 or more employees, though the sweet spot is 50 and up. Implementation typically takes four to eight weeks with a dedicated onboarding manager included at no additional cost—customers consistently cite the guided setup and ongoing customer success support as differentiators.

One note for prospective buyers: Lattice recently decided to sunset its HRIS and payroll modules, which launched in 2024, to refocus on its core performance and engagement capabilities. For companies evaluating Lattice as a potential HRIS replacement, that's off the table. Instead, the platform integrates with existing HR systems of record like Workday, BambooHR, and others, positioning itself as the engagement and performance layer rather than a full HR suite.

Key Takeaway

For mid-market HR leaders seeking to consolidate fragmented people tools into a single platform—and who value depth of analytics and continuous innovation over bare-bones simplicity—Lattice represents the current category benchmark. The investment in AI features, combined with genuine integration across performance, engagement, and development data, creates capabilities that lighter-weight alternatives don't match. The trade-off is a premium price point and an initial configuration investment that requires HR bandwidth to execute well.

Learn more at lattice.com