Reimagining Lattice: An AI-First Approach to 
Meaningful Work

This year, our Hack Week theme at Lattice was “For the Love of Humans.” The idea was that as Lattice continues to expand its horizons to become a full people platform, we always keep in mind our mission to “make work meaningful” for people – that at the core of what we do are the humans Lattice empowers.

Throughout the week, we were reminded to embrace the humanity at the heart of our products and continue to be industry-leading innovators. Every line of code, every pixel in design, and every strategic decision serves our mission to elevate the human work experience.

With AI as my current focus at Lattice, I wanted to reimagine Lattice as if it had been built from the start with an AI-first mindset. My project involved redesigning Lattice around an intelligent AI assistant that proactively supports managers and other Lattice users.

Following agentic AI principles, I designed the assistant to proactively summarize team health, surface critical insights about team sentiment and workload, offer thoughtful suggestions based on team data, and even help managers practice difficult conversations through voice interactions.

My goal with this redesign was to tell a story and set a north star for us to be inspired by. What makes this AI assistant experience special and unique to Lattice is how it combines employee data insights with emotional intelligence—helping managers take thoughtful action while maintaining decision-making control and leadership sensitivity.

I’m excited to share that my project won the Human-Centered Impact Award at Hack Week for its innovative approach to supporting emotionally intelligent leadership!

Designing for Complexity: Flexible Budgeting at Lattice

Jayneil Dalal, host of the Sneak Peek podcast, invited me to talk about organizing Figma files and growth design at Lattice. During our conversation, I had the chance to walk him through my process and share insights from one of the most complex projects I’ve tackled at Lattice: Flexible Budgeting in our Compensation product.

I worked on the Compensation product for nearly two years, and in early 2024, we worked on “Compensation 2.0,” a major initiative to achieve product-market fit. The goal was to increase attach rate and retention by addressing significant gaps in our product. At the time, only 15% of existing customers were completing the activation funnel to successfully end a compensation cycle, and our sales team had paused actively selling the product due to gaps that were disqualifying us during the sales process.

One of the most critical gaps was our limited budgeting functionality, which was consistently the top deal-breaker for prospective customers and a major barrier for existing customers attempting to launch compensation cycles. Flexible Budgeting was our solution to this challenge. The project introduced new functionality that enabled admins to allocate budgets in ways aligned with their compensation philosophies. They could choose between different allocation methods, define various types of increases (such as merit, promotion, market adjustments, and cost-of-living adjustments), and create specific rules for different employee groups. The feature also provided managers with tailored guidance on increases, including ranges to work within and explicit instructions to follow.

This project required extensive research and numerous design explorations, iterating across divergent directions to address diverse user needs. Ultimately, I developed a solution that accommodated varying compensation philosophies, nuanced increase structures, and clear, actionable guidance for managers—empowering customers to successfully complete their compensation cycles.

Watch the podcast to get a sneak peek of my final designs and a glimpse at the many iterations I went through to land on an elegant solution to a complex and multi-layered problem.