Capacity planner

At a company with over 40,000 employees, staffing is genuinely complex. People managers at SAP typically oversee multiple teams working across several projects simultaneously, with employees sometimes shared between managers. Knowing who has capacity and when is essential for planning, but the tools available were either too basic or too complex for most managers to use.

Most managers tracked capacity in spreadsheets or relied on a small group of expert users with access to complex enterprise planning tools. Neither worked well at scale. Managers lacked visibility into their teams, and the expert tools were too heavy for day-to-day use.

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I worked on product management, UX and UI design, and user research. We started by interviewing managers and expert users to understand the gap between their needs, then ran workshops with users and stakeholders to validate our approach. The tool was built iteratively with regular usability testing, both remote and in person, to make sure it was actually solving the right problems. A key design challenge was making something simple enough for everyday managers while still giving expert users the depth they needed for large-scale workforce reporting.