Workforce Planning
Planning 20,000 employees across three countries
Picnic operates fulfilment centres, delivery hubs, and customer support teams across three countries with over 20,000 employees to plan, schedule, and manage. The workforce planning platform is the daily tool for people admins, planners, and team leads. A single place to monitor capacity, manage shifts, and see who is coming in. Before it existed, they were doing all of this across spreadsheets and tools that were not built for the job.
Role
2023 – ongoing
Product designer (Team of 2)
End-to-end UX
Stakeholder alignment
Impact
€200K annual cost reduction
By improving capacity constraints
€70K annual cost reduction
by freeing up team lead time
The Challenge
A supply chain too complex for off-the-shelf tools
Picnic’s operations do not map neatly onto generic workforce planning software. Fulfilment centres, delivery hubs, and CS teams each have different capacity requirements, shift structures, and labour regulations. And those regulations vary across three countries. No third-party tool could handle that combination, so team leads made do with what they had.
Fragmented workflow
Planning spread across multiple tools with no single source of truth. Slow, error-prone, and hard to hand over.
Wrong tools for the job
Generic software could not account for Picnic’s operational complexity or local labour regulations.
No room to scale
A patchwork of tools that worked for one country or one team could not grow with the business.
How might we build a workforce planning tool that handles the full complexity of Picnic’s operations, scales across three countries, and stays simple enough for team leads working under time pressure?
One tool for the full planning workflow
The platform brought capacity monitoring, shift creation, and employee management into one place, built around how team leads actually work. Rather than locking into fixed solutions early, we kept the design flexible and iterated based on real usage as workflows and regulations across countries kept evolving.
What I took away
The biggest challenge was not the design. It was building something scalable while the workflows and regulations it needed to support kept changing. It taught me to hold structure loosely, stay close to real usage, and design systems that work across contexts rather than for a single team.
*This is an internal product. Screens shown are representative. More detail available on request.