Problems
Why are we making changes?
Clients built budgets in Excel or on paper. Every cycle meant re-entering data and reconciling disconnected sheets.
Problem Statement
How might we help operators
make staffing decisions with confidence,
with numbers they trust?
User Needs
What we heard from operators, onsite.
- data points
- 6,000+
- interviews
- 12
- key findings
- 11
Finding severity across 11 synthesized findings
n=11 design-team findings. Severity reflects synthesis priority, not respondent frequency.
“I print the schedule and write costs in pen.”
“The budget didn't update until the next morning.”
“Schedule, budget, calculator. Every day.”
“We were $6K over. Nobody told me.”
“I find out after the shift happened.”
“Show me sales, labor, and schedule together.”
“The overtime alert came six hours late.”
“My new AM needed three weeks.”
“Just show me if I'm staffed right.”
Existing State
Powerful but manual & disconnected from scheduling.
Existed
- Revenue-based budgeting
- Hours-based budgeting
- Hybrid model support
- Org hierarchy sync
- Historical revenue data
- Historical labor data
- Manual overrides
Missing
- Real-time schedule sync
- Inline scheduling guidance
- Agentic recommendations
- Integration with live systems
Competitor Research
How adjacent tools handle forecasting and scheduling.
Heuristic assessment of public product surfaces. Axes use a Low / Medium / High rubric based on how directly each tool supports an operator decision and how clearly it explains the recommendation.
Solution 1
Smart defaults that autofill the setup process.
Design Challenge 1
Simplifying Distribution.
Picture an umbrella rental shop. You'd put 75% of your annual budget into summer. Then 75% of that into weekends. Then 60% into peak afternoon hours. Each decision flows into how many people you hire and when.
Design Challenge 2
Manual before agentic.
The first 4 months were manual so setup was clean before we handed inputs and outputs to ML.
Solution 2
Decision guidance inside scheduling.
Design Challenge 1
Documenting current state.
The scheduling grid predated design systems department entirely and had no docs. We mapped patterns, states, and components.
Design Challenge 2
Building the system.
We rebuilt the grid atomically from the ground up for budgeting, then helped engineering ship it to the global library for QA.
Building Together
Same room. Every sprint.
Devs, PMs, and design systems worked in the same room. We resolved logic with engineers, built components with systems, and iterated with the PM all in the same cycle.
Spec & Design
Takeaways
Collaboration drove the strongest decisions
Manual-first design made AI possible
Trust requires transparency at point of decision
Resilience under organizational change
Design systems as a force multiplier
Setup is a conversation, not a form