Happy Tools by Automattic: A scheduling tool built for distributed teams

Jetpack AI Assistant

Maker

Hey there! I’m Eduardo, part of the team that is working on Happy Tools. We launched a few weeks ago and we’re very excited about sharing the tools that have helped us here at Automattic to work in a fully distributed way. Happy Schedule is the first tool we’ve released, and we plan to open signups completely very soon. Until then, we've prepared a 5-min product intro video going over the UI, how we use it, etc. Check it out here, and please let us know if you have any question!

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6yr ago

David Oudiette

The Landing Page Cookbook

@evilluendas Hi Eduardo! I'm very curious about the software-for-distributed-teams software space, and I was wondering what challenges you faced (or would have faced) with existing resource scheduling tools like, e.g. Float? What are the specific challenges when the team is remote?

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6yr ago

Eduardo Villuendas

Jetpack AI Assistant

Maker

@davidoudiette Hi David, thanks for your question! We started building Happy Schedule specifically for our customer support team because none of the existing solutions really solved the issues they were struggling with. On one hand we needed way more flexibility in the way our support agents reported their availability than the tools they had tried before was able to provide; we wanted to allow folks to work when it works best for them instead of fitting them into predefined schedules (because why replicate 9 to 5 office hours when you don't really have an office?), so we needed tools for that. On the other hand, time zones can be a nightmare when you're trying to optimize the workday of a team of 200 people across the globe, so we made sure that this tool could handle different time zones, people traveling or even DST changes flawlessly.

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6yr ago

David Oudiette

The Landing Page Cookbook

@evilluendas I see. It makes a lot of sense for support teams, as the problem you're trying to solve is matching a certain level of service consistently, i.e. allocate resources evenly while taking into account timezones/individual preferences. In that way, it's closer to what you'd find in shift management kinds of apps. Not sure how suitable it is for more project based work with different types of constraints.

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6yr ago