Workforce Scheduling
A flexible workforce scheduling app at scale
Picnic’s scheduling app is the daily companion for 20,000+ warehouse workers and delivery drivers across three countries. It lets employees view their schedule, claim and return shifts, communicate availability, and trade shifts with colleagues. Shifts carry multiple states. Scheduled, available to claim, pending trade. All in a single view designed to be read at a glance.
Role
2023 – ongoing
Product designer (Team of 2)
From Discovery to Delivery
Impact
€200K annual cost reduction
By moving away from third party tools
€120K annual cost reduction
By preventing capacity constraints
The Challenge
Flexibility that doesn't break the business
With a workforce that skews young and student-heavy, flexibility wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the difference between an employee staying or leaving. But unconstrained flexibility breaks operations. Nobody works Friday nights, warehouses go understaffed. The work focused on that tension: building features that gave employees real control without compromising Picnic’s ability to keep things running.
Employee Needs
Flexibility to fit shifts around studies, exams, and life, without being locked into a fixed rota weeks in advance.
Business Needs
Reliable capacity across warehouses and delivery routes, especially during peak times and across three countries with different labour laws.
How might we give employees meaningful control over their schedules without compromising Picnic’s ability to keep warehouses and deliveries running?
The work
Over two years, I worked across the full product. From the core scheduling view to notifications, shift states, edge case flows, and cross-country variations in labour rules. The two features below are examples of where the design challenge was most interesting.
Feature 01 - Availability Submission
Scheduling around real life
Previously, employees worked fixed schedules with little room to signal when they were or weren’t available. The availability portal changed that. A weekly view where employees could communicate their availability in advance, feeding directly into how shifts were assigned.
Feature 02 - Swapping Shifts
Letting employees solve scheduling problems themselves
Sometimes life happens after a shift is already booked. Shift swapping let employees trade shifts directly with colleagues, reducing the burden on managers and giving employees a self-serve way out when plans changed.
The key design decision was making the swap feel safe and clear for both sides. The employee offering a shift needed confidence it would be covered. The employee accepting needed to know exactly what they were taking on. Status visibility at every step of the trade was central to making it work.
The features gave employees meaningful control over their schedules without compromising operational reliability. Satisfaction improved and last-minute scheduling pressure on managers reduced. By replacing third-party tooling and removing processes that previously needed team lead involvement, the platform delivers an estimated €320K in annual savings across 20,000+ employees in three countries.
What started as a two-person team building foundational scheduling flows grew into a product serving 20,000+ employees across three countries, with every screen and interaction owned end-to-end.
*Screens have been redesigned to protect confidential information.