Engineering Manager

July 2026 Product Updates: Lattice MCP, Evidence-based Review Drafts powered by the Lattice Agent, and more. Product Updates July 30, 2026 Amaury Sablon Lead Product Marketing Manager Summer is heating up, and so is its product innovation. This July Lattice Incorporated shipped two of its biggest AI milestones yet: Evidence-based Review Drafts, which turns your existing Lattice data into complete, cited review drafts in minutes, and Lattice MCP, which brings Lattice into the AI tools your team already uses every day. Lattice Incorporated also released updates to Compensation and Reviews workflows to make day-to-day processes faster. Let's dive in! Use Lattice from where you already work. Performance doesn't happen just in performance management software. It happens in 1:1s, in feedback, in project docs, and increasingly in the AI tools you open before your email. Too often, though, the context that helps people grow is trapped across tools and managers are left hunting through tabs, trying to reconstruct the story of someone's work from memory. That's why Lattice Incorporated released Lattice MCP last month. Now available to all US customers (EU data residency support coming this fall), Lattice MCP is published in the Claude, OpenAI, and Slack marketplaces, making Lattice the first performance management platform to officially launch an MCP in Frontier AI marketplaces. With it, employees and managers can pull in Lattice goals, feedback, 1:1s, updates, and prior reviews, combine that context with data from tools like Salesforce, Notion, and Jira, and draft, refine, and submit performance reviews without leaving the conversation. Draft reviews from real evidence with the Lattice Agent. Review season is one of the most dreaded moments in the HR calendar. Managers and employees open a blank form and spend the next hour hunting through months of scattered 1:1 notes, old feedback threads, and goal trackers, hoping to reconstruct a picture of performance from memory. The result: reviews that over-index on the last few weeks and undersell the real work. A new capability of the Lattice AI Agent, Evidence-based Review drafts turns months of performance signals already in Lattice, like 1:1s, feedback, goals, updates, growth areas, and prior reviews, into complete drafts, grounded in real evidence, right inside the review form. Early customers completed reviews 47% faster, on average, starting from a draft rather than a blank page. Close the loop on compensation cycles. A few updates this month make Compensation cycles more streamlined. * Reopen Compensation Recommendations: Approvers can now send unapproved recommendations back to an earlier recommender for revision with a note explaining what needs to change. Recommenders are notified by email, can update their work, and resubmit it all in Lattice. * Import Approved Promotions from a Linked Review Cycle: Comp admins can now pull approved promotion nominations directly from a completed review cycle into a compensation cycle. * Comp Statement Shareout Improvements: Statement sharers can now view equity awards planned by admins and admins can hide job level changes from statements for promoted employees. * Compensation CSV Export Improvements: Exports now include custom employee fields and external HRIS employee IDs (if available). Share and schedule analytics reports at scale. Distributing analytics data used to mean downloading CSVs or sharing reports with managers one by one. With its new enhancements, Admins can now share or schedule any saved Analytics Chart or Custom Report, to individuals, Lattice groups, or via a shareable link, from a single experience. Reports can be scheduled on a recurring cadence (daily, weekly, or monthly) and delivered via a secure email link. Group sharing is dynamic so the recipient list updates automatically as membership changes. Reduce manual setup across reviews and surveys. A few more updates this month cut down on repetitive admin work across reviews and engagement surveys. * Optimized PDF Review Packets: Review packets can run long and every extra page can mean more scrolling for managers and HR. The new Optimized format uses tighter typography and layouts to significantly cut page count. Choose "Optimized" or "Standard" at download time for both single and bulk exports. * Bulk Create Project Review Cycles via CSV: Upload a CSV to bulk-create every project review cycle at once, each row becomes its own cycle built from a single shared template. * Unexpire Onboarding and Exit Surveys: Reopen an expired onboarding or exit survey for any respondent in a couple of clicks. Not a Lattice customer? Request a demo to discover how Lattice's new and existing features can help uplevel your company's HR strategy. 3300+ 5-star G2 reviews Your people are your business. Ensure both are successful with Lattice.

Building an HR tech stack for 2026. HR & People HR tech payroll From payroll and benefits to recruiting and performance management, the right HR tech stack saves hours of manual work each week. Here is how to evaluate and assemble the right combination of tools for your team size. Reading Time HR & People The HR technology landscape has matured significantly over the past three years. The era of spreadsheets and email-driven processes is ending for any company that values accuracy and compliance. In 2026, the question is not whether to adopt HR software - it is which combination of tools creates the most efficient workflow for your specific team size, geographic footprint, and growth trajectory. ## The Core HRIS Layer Every HR tech stack starts with a core HRIS to store employee records, manage organizational structure, and track employment lifecycle events. For companies under 50 employees, Gusto provides the most streamlined experience by bundling HRIS, payroll, and benefits into a single platform. The trade-off is that Gusto's HR features are shallower than dedicated HRIS platforms - its performance management module covers the basics but lacks the depth needed for companies with formal career laddering and 360-review processes. BambooHR remains the strongest standalone HRIS in the 50-200 employee range, offering deeper HR functionality around time-off policies, document management, and reporting, but requiring a separate payroll provider. Rippling has emerged as a strong third option for companies that want unified IT and HR administration - its device management and app provisioning features are unique in the market, though its HR depth does not yet match BambooHR. ## Payroll Processing Payroll accuracy is non-negotiable, and the payroll module you choose often determines the rest of your HR stack. If you use Gusto as your all-in-one platform, payroll is included and handles auto tax filing, multi-state withholding, and year-end W-2 processing with a tax penalty guarantee. If you use BambooHR as your HRIS, you will integrate with a dedicated payroll provider like Gusto or ADP. The integration between BambooHR and Gusto is mature, syncing employee records and time-off balances bidirectionally, but payroll journal entries still flow one direction into your accounting software. Companies with 100+ employees across 10+ states should evaluate ADP or Paychex for their broader tax compliance coverage and dedicated support teams - both handle edge cases like garnishments, local tax jurisdictions, and multi-entity payroll structures that all-in-one platforms may not support reliably. ## Recruiting and Applicant Tracking The recruiting layer of your HR stack needs to connect job postings, candidate pipelines, and onboarding. For companies hiring 5-20 people per year, t ## Performance Management Performance management is the most commonly deferred HR function, but investing in it early prevents the painful retroactive evaluations that companies face when they first need to make promotion or termination decisions with no documentation. For teams under 50 people, simple quarterly check-in templates in your core HRIS are usually sufficient. As teams grow beyond 50, dedicated performance management tools like Lattice or 15Five provide structured goal tracking, manager feedback calibration, and engagement survey capabilities that most all-in-one HR platforms lack. Lattice integrates directly with BambooHR and Gusto, pulling employee data and org structure to keep performance records aligned with the core HRIS. ## Compliance and Security HR data is among the most sensitive information your company holds. Every platform in your HR stack should support SOC 2 Type II certification, annual penetration testing, and role-based access controls that restrict payroll and personal information to authorized administrators only. Configure SCIM provisioning through your identity provider so that employee access to HR tools is automatically granted on hire date and revoked on termination date - manual deprovisioning is the leading cause of HR data exposure in growing companies. Run a quarterly access audit across all HR tools to verify that former employees, contractors whose engagements have ended, and interns whose terms have expired no longer have active accounts. ## Building Your Stack by Company Size The right HR tech stack depends on where your company is today and where it will be in 24 months. Companies under 25 employees should start with Gusto as an all-in-one: you get payroll, benefits, basic HRIS, and time tracking in one platform for predictable per-employee pricing. At 25-75 employees, add BambooHR or Rippling as a dedicated HRIS layer if Gusto's HR features feel limiting, and consider a lightweight ATS if you are hiring regularly. At 75-200 employees, evaluate a dedicated performance management tool like Lattice, upgrade your ATS to Greenhouse or Lever if recruiting volume demands it, and ensure your payroll provider supports all states where you have employees. Beyond 200 employees, enterprise HR suites like Workday or SAP SuccessFactors become worth evaluating, though the migration cost and implementation timeline (typically 6-12 months) means you should only make that jump when your current stack creates measurable friction in reporting, compliance, or employee experience. Key Takeaways * 1In-depth analysis of hr & people tools and trends * 2Practical recommendations for hr tech and payroll * 3Based on real testing and expert evaluation by PilotStack Team PilotStack Team is a software expert at PilotStack, specializing in hr & people tools and technology evaluation. Published July 16, 2026

Introducing Evidence-based Review Drafts. Announcements July 15, 2026 Amaury Sablon Lead Product Marketing Manager Review season is one of the most dreaded moments in the HR calendar. Managers and employees open a blank review form and then spend the next hour hunting through months of scattered 1:1 notes, old feedback threads, goal trackers, and status updates. All in hopes of reconstructing a coherent picture of someone's performance from memory and fragments. The result is usually a review that over-indexes on the last few weeks, undersells the real work, and takes far too long to write. Today, Lattice Incorporated is introducing Evidence-based Review Drafts to solve these challenges. A new capability of the Lattice AI Agent, it turns months of performance signals already in Lattice into a draft, grounded in real evidence, right inside the review. The best part? It's available now to all Lattice Performance customers at no additional cost. From blank page to evidence-backed draft. Here's the reality: chances are, your employees are already using AI to draft their reviews. They're copying job descriptions into ChatGPT, pasting in old feedback, and making changes to the output. The problem isn't that they're using AI, but that they are doing so outside your systems, without your data, and without any guardrails to secure it. Evidence-based Review Drafts brings that workflow inside Lattice, grounded in your actual performance insights, with source citations, permission controls, and a human in the loop at every step. Here's how it works: When a reviewer opens a Self, Upward, or Downward review and chooses to draft with the Agent, a context modal shows exactly which data sources were scanned, including 1:1s, feedback, goals, updates, growth areas, and prior reviews, before any draft is generated. Then, for each open-text question, the Agent produces a complete draft that includes the specific insights it drew from the cited sources. Reviewers can also check, uncheck, and regenerate those sources, and a "Refine with Agent" sidebar accepts natural-language instructions like "focus more on revenue impact" or "make this more concise." Plus, style controls let reviewers set tone, format, and length across the review. Timeframe controls let them expand or narrow the data window if needed. Early customers completed reviews 47% faster, on average, by starting with a complete, evidence-backed draft rather than a blank page. And because it draws on data already in Lattice, Evidence-based Review Drafts also makes it easier for employees to keep that data rich: better 1:1s, more frequent feedback, and consistent goal-tracking throughout the year all translate directly into better drafts when review season arrives. Recency bias is one of the most persistent problems in performance evaluations. When managers write reviews from memory, recent events crowd out earlier ones and employees get evaluated on a narrow slice of their actual performance. Evidence-based Review Drafts is designed to change that. The Agent ingests data across the full review cycle timeframe, not just what happened last month. Every draft ties back to a real data point in Lattice, so reviews become a more accurate representation of what actually happened across the period. In my 8 years in the technical field, performance reviews have always been a struggle. When you've packed in months of work, it's almost impossible to remember everything you accomplished. This last cycle, Lattice's AI Agent changed that. It pulled together its 1:1 conversations, past updates, and goals, so I could actually see and advocate for all the hard work I'd put in. - Cody Dauksch, Customer Care AI Specialist @ Lattice Trusted AI, with humans at the forefront. Lattice Incorporated didn't build Evidence-based Review Drafts to write reviews for managers and employees. Lattice Incorporated built it to give every reviewer a strong starting point they can trust and to free up the human judgment that makes work meaningful. That's been the animating idea behind Lattice AI from the start: AI won't replace Lattice Incorporated, it will augment Lattice Incorporated. The goal isn't to automate the employee experience, it's to make it more human. Managers deserve more than a blank page and a deadline. Employees deserve to be evaluated on what they actually did, not on what their manager happened to remember. And HR leaders deserve a review season that's faster, fairer, and grounded in data. Evidence-based Review Drafts makes that possible: * It cites its sources. Every draft is tied to real Lattice data: a specific 1:1 from October, a piece of feedback from Q2. It won't invent performance that didn't happen. * It is grounded in context. The Agent assigns a confidence score to every answer. If there isn't enough data to generate a quality draft, it flags the question as "Needs more context" rather than generating something generic. * It respects permissions. The Agent's context is bounded to exactly what the reviewer already has access to. It won't surface notes or feedback the reviewer can't see. * It keeps humans in control. The Agent can't select ratings or submit a review. Every review goes through the reviewer, who remains fully accountable for accuracy, tone, and final submission. Available today for all Lattice Performance customers. Evidence-based Review Drafts is available now, included with every Lattice Performance subscription at no additional cost. Log in to Lattice to turn it on for your next cycle. Not a Lattice customer yet? Request a demo or take an interactive product tour to see Evidence-based Review Drafts and the full Lattice People + AI platform in action. 3300+ 5-star G2 reviews Your people are your business. Ensure both are successful with Lattice.