154%
Company
Salesforce
Role
Product Designer
Year
2025
Project Overview
Salesforce Field Service supports enterprise-scale organizations in managing mobile workforces (think internet services or utility technicians). The key personas orchestrating the every-day work within a company include the Dispatcher, the Field Technician and the Planner. While the Dispatcher uses the Dispatch Console to assign Technicians to jobs, it’s only possible to schedule a few weeks ahead at most, leaving large enterprises vulnerable if an unexpected need arises. If a vacuum of work is created it could mean loss of money but it could also be a safety risk for end-customers.
After understanding the business case and general user pain for the Capacity Planning dashboard, it was time for a deep dive to get to know the users and understand which tools lead the market today within the Capacity Planning space for Enterprise. But it’s not as simple as looking at what competing experiences look like.
Our users are the “Planners” within their operations teams. Capacity planning is a forward-looking process that forecasts demand, compares it to supply, and actively helps the Planner to adjust the schedule to avoid future gaps.
I focused on understanding Planners’ workflows, pain points and decision triggers. Through stakeholder interviews and user research synthesis I started shaping early concepts that aligned with users’ goals.
Affinity mapping workshop that I co-led and included participants from several teams including Product, Design and Research.
what we learned
To help us get to a more focused level of understanding in our research synthesis, we used Claude and NotebookLM for summarizing and thematic clustering. As input we used customer VOCs, Solution Engineer interviews, UX Research team documents, related meeting summaries and other helpful documents.
What causes capacity gaps?
Power outages during storms
Mutual aid agreements between utilities share resources but spike demand.
Humanitarian aid during crises
Companies respond to worldwide SOS crises, such as climate emergencies.
Annual, advertised events
Marketing campaigns and holiday shopping cause service demand spikes.
How can gaps be resolved?
Autonomous negotiation
Enable AI agents to interact as planners that negotiate between organizations.
Upskill management
Identify skill gaps and training needs; provide pathways for upskilling.
Allocation based on urgency
Measure and prioritize according to urgency of work and service needs
the numbers behind the pain
A bane of Planners’ existence is inefficient scheduling, which directly translates to higher overtime, higher idle time and lower utilization, missed targets and loss of revenue. Even small scheduling errors can create significant overtime costs, service delays or underutilization. Nearly 1/3 of total work hours are spent handling unplanned outages and emergencies; the reactive nature of Capacity Planning seems to (unfortunately) define most of the experience.
There are many ways to a Planner can resolve a Gap, some are Preventive (“Let’s plan ahead an avoid having a Gap in the future!”) and some resolutions are Reactive (“Omg there is a pretty serious Capacity Gap coming up!”). Our debut into the Capacity Planning world focused on Capacity Limits. Why? Because it was the most urgent pain point for Planners; It was also a high-impact, low-scope starting point and it was foundational to solving the larger scope of Capacity Planning.
How can Planners resolve Capacity Gaps?
the capacity limits dashboard
The Daily and Weekly Views of Capacity Limits help capacity planners quickly compare consumed hours across work types. Our goal was to make it easy to understand at a glance what the daily consumption is vs. it’s respective limit.
The Capacity Limits dashboard marked our first step into capacity planning, establishing a foundational validated feature before advancing toward proactive gap resolution.
mapping edge cases
With a very wide variety of edge cases, it was important to map how each might be expressed to help us stress-test the experience and logic.
The capacity planning dashboard was made with a deep consideration for the Planner. Upon landing the Planner needs to quickly understand their KPIs and data visualizations of those KPIs that they set up according to their organization’s needs. From there, they can choose to gain insights or to act on insights with or without the help of the Gap Resolution AI Agent.
Capacity Planning was a large-scale effort spanning several teams within Salesforce Field Service. I’m incredibly proud of this team effort.
The product matured from a Capacity Limit focus to a Planner-first operational dashboard that can bridge the gap during emergencies and other large-scale events for our customers
Upon launch Capacity Planning saw immediate partnerships with 2 enterprise design partners
An agent-based capacity gap resolution flow was presented to the CEO of Salesforce (Marc Benioff) within a few months of launch
Improved stakeholder alignment through SE and planner workshops, translating field realities into product-ready requirements
