SAN FRANCISCO — Sarah Franklin did not reach the top of a technology company through a sequence of neatly ascending titles. The Lattice chief executive describes her path as a “jungle gym”: sometimes upward, sometimes sideways and repeatedly shaped by the skill she needed next.
In a Reuters interview published on 4 September, Franklin traced that path from retail and restaurant work through chemical engineering, Lockheed Martin, consulting and 15 years at Salesforce. She became Lattice’s chief executive in January 2024 after holding senior Salesforce roles spanning platform technology, developer relations and marketing.
The metaphor is more than career advice. Ladders reward people who begin close to the correct structure and understand its rules. Franklin has recalled struggling to secure interviews in college, then helping organise a career fair that gave her access to employers. The first professional opening did not simply appear; she helped build the doorway.
Her technical training became useful beyond engineering. Franklin learned to translate between the people developing a product and those deciding why it mattered. That ability—to move between code, customers and institutional strategy—eventually became a leadership advantage rather than a departure from her original field.
Lateral movement can be especially relevant to women, whose careers are more likely to be interrupted or redirected by care, exclusion or workplaces that do not promote them at the same rate as men. A sideways move may preserve income, build authority or open a route around a blocked manager.
It can also be romanticised. Not every worker can accept a lower title, relocate or gamble on a role whose value may become clear only later. Employers should not use flexibility rhetoric to excuse opaque promotion criteria or expect women to keep proving themselves through extra assignments.
Franklin now leads a company that sells performance-management and human-resources software. That creates a direct test of her philosophy. In an era of AI-assisted hiring and evaluation, systems must not turn an unconventional résumé into a penalty or treat a linear history as evidence of greater potential.
Her story is strongest when understood as both agency and structure. She cultivated a rare combination of technical and communication skills, but access still depended on who would interview, sponsor and promote her.
The practical lesson is not that every woman should copy Franklin’s route. It is that careers contain more directions than a ladder admits—and leaders who benefited from an unexpected opening have a responsibility to create more of them.
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