What's the design?

Shift scheduling is a major pain point for companies with many requirements to meet every single time a schedule is made. Not only does an employer have complex needs to manage, but labour regulations around the world require employers to provide specific employee breaks and rest, and in certain parts of the world, there are collective bargaining agreements with unions that dictate specific scheduling conditions. Software solutions have historically focused on the regulative part of scheduling and not automation, satisfaction or speed.

In 2018, Datapult was launched and quickly became a leading AI consultancy in the Nordics, planning shifts for countless companies across a vast array of industries. Using AI, Datapult generates around one billion schedules and picks the best. This way, they always find the shifts that make everyone happy - be it employers, employees, unions and more.

The hurdle
"Due to the large extent of regulation, workforce planning has focused on compliance," explains Jacob Knobel, Founder of Datapult. Instead, Knobel believes planning software should focus on employee satisfaction and individual work-life balance, whether an employee wants to work a lot and earn money or spend more time with family.

"After COVID, a lot of us get to work from the comfort of our homes using Teams and Zoom," explains Knobel. "But what about shift workers in factories, hospitals or police stations, and why aren't we designing products for them?" 

As the world economy is facing some turbulent years ahead combined with the current shortage of employees, Knobel asks: how can we design products in the workforce planning space that increase employee satisfaction, reduce costs, and even enhance existing solutions?

"We've spent the last three years designing such a product, and now we can simultaneously increase employee satisfaction and reduce costs," he says. "Quite a design accomplishment in an industry as old as the punch clock."

The strategy
Knobel hand-picked the first clients and worked through countless design sprints with them. “We had clients who wanted us to do everything related to their workforce, so we spent a lot of time with our first clients to map out all their commonalities and design a unified product around that," explains Knobel.

What they ended up with is an AI engine that can simulate hundreds of millions of rosters and pick the one that's legally sound and most satisfactory for both employees and employers. And, more impressively, their product not only seamlessly met the needs of their current users but had massive potential to improve other industries. "Being a mathematician by education, I would say the design is well-parametrized," says Knobel.

In addition to designing an internationally-relevant product, finding a fit in the market has also been a critical part of the strategy.

"If everyone adheres to regulation, then why not take advantage of that and focus your design on improving scheduling further?" asked Knobel. "After looking at regulation as a step toward happier employees, companies can take another step in the direction of happier employees by involving them in the scheduling process. This can help ensure that schedules are fair and take individual preferences into account, while still complying with relevant laws and regulations."

Today, Datapult meets regulations and current systems but automates most of the manual work and allows employees more control over their work lives.

Knobel is an early-stage investor himself and in his opinion, any entrepreneurial product designer who wants to out-compete existing market solutions because their 'product is better', mustn't underestimate the loyalty and trust between clients and their current solution.

"You should be humble about the fact that the existing solutions can do things you can't, however small they might seem to you," he explains. "Why not play into that and design your product almost like a plugin?" There are few phone manufacturers in the world, but countless app designers and wireless headset manufacturers, therefore, designing a product on top of a platform gives shorter time to market and lets you focus on what you do well."

Tips from the designer:

• Incumbents are not competitors. They must've done something right to reach their position - talk to them, collaborate and exchange experiences and ideas.
• Remember products have seasons too. Too often product buyers and sellers want to replace their current products with something new, but great product design and plug-ins can significantly extend lifecycles.
• Explore but don't exploit. Product design is an explore-exploit problem. When do you explore your design and keep improving it, and when do you switch to going to market with your design? The quicker you go from exploring to exploiting, the quicker time-to-market but the smaller the market size. 
• Make it easy to get started and think about scalability from the outset. “You can't think of anything more complex than work time regulating systems,” says Knobel. “But with the right amount of up-front design, we have reduced the setup time to a few hours.”
• Involve the end-user. Employees often loathe IT systems and while that might never change, enterprise software designers must cooperate with end-users - not just with the financial decision-maker.