Product Design · Algorithm Design · Mobile Engineering
Product
2023
Tidal is a workforce scheduling product for retail and hospitality. It takes the constraints that schedulers know intuitively — the part-timer who can't open on Thursdays, the team dynamic that only works if two particular people don't close together — and turns them into logic.
Scheduling tools optimise for coverage. Tidal needed to optimise for people. The constraints that matter most in practice are the ones that're impossible to enter into a spreadsheet.
We designed a constraint language that's expressive enough to capture human complexity without requiring users to think in algorithms. The interface feels like filling in a form. The engine underneath is treating it as a constraint-satisfaction problem.
Tidal is currently used by scheduling coordinators across multiple retail environments. Schedule disputes have decreased. Coordinator time spent on rework has dropped substantially.