An AI-native employee-scheduling platform for restaurants, designed and built end-to-end.

My Role

Founder and product designer, and I led all marketing alongside it. That meant owning research, product design, the design system, feature development, and the marketing website — the entire surface, not a slice of it.

The Problem

Scheduling tools for restaurants and shift-based teams are clunky and overbuilt for the independent operators who actually use them. An owner running one location needs software that removes work from their day. Most of what is available adds to it.

Constraints

Solo designer. Building AI-native from the first commit rather than retrofitting it later. And competing directly against established, well-funded players.

Process — owning the whole stack

I started with customer understanding and a hard look at the competition, working through Homebase, When I Work, Deputy, and Connecteam to find the UX gaps each of them left open. From there: low-fidelity prototypes, usability iteration, a coded design system, and feature development.

The commercial shape mattered as much as the interface. We priced at $1.99 per user per month, targeted restaurants and healthcare, and made ease of use the differentiator rather than feature count.

Key Decisions

Mobile-first schedule management. Research kept surfacing the same two needs: clocking in and out, and managing schedules from a phone. The nuance was that managers still prefer to build and edit a schedule on a computer — but they need to make changes on the go. Designing for that split, rather than picking one, became the central bet.

Outcome

A bootstrapped company of just five employees. We scaled it to thousands of paying users before I left.

Reflection

Another great startup experience owning both marketing and product design, for a small and tremendously talented group of founders I learned a great deal from.