Problems
Why are we making changes?
Clients built labor budgets in Excel or on pen and paper. Every cycle meant re-entering data by hand, reconciling numbers across disconnected spreadsheets, and hoping nothing fell out of sync with the rest of their data and HGR.
Problem Statement
How might we help operators
make staffing decisions with confidence,
with numbers they trust?
User Needs
What we heard from operators, onsite.
6,000+
data points
12
interviews
11
key findings
“I literally print the schedule and write costs in pen next to each name.”
— Manager
“I changed a shift at 2pm and the budget didn't update until the next morning.”
— Shift Lead
“I have the schedule open, the budget in another tab, and a calculator app. Every single day.”
— Manager
“We blew $6K over budget last period. Nobody told me until the P&L came out.”
— Director
“By the time I find out I'm over budget, the shift already happened.”
— Shift Lead
“I just want sales, labor, and the schedule on one screen. That's it.”
— GM
“I got an overtime alert at 9pm. The overtime happened at 3pm.”
— Shift Lead
“It took my new AM three weeks to figure out the budget tool. Three weeks.”
— Director
“I don't need 40 charts. Just show me: am I staffed right today, yes or no.”
— Shift Lead
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.
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 purely manual perfecting setup so opt-out clients got a clean experience, and so we knew exactly what inputs and outputs to hand the ML team.
Solution 2
Decision guidance inside scheduling.
Design Challenge 1
Documenting current state.
The scheduling grid predated our design systems department entirely and had never been documented. When two other modules needed the same grid, I partnered with design systems to map every pattern, state, and component from scratch.
Design Challenge 2
Building the system.
We built the grid atomically from the ground up to incorporate budgeting seamlessly, then worked with engineering to ship it to the global library removing every bottleneck between us and QA.
Building Together
Same room. Every sprint.
Cross-functional sprints with devs, PMs, and design systems in the same room. We resolved logic with engineers, built components with systems, and iterated with the PM all in the same cycle. What used to take weeks moved in hours.
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