Happy Tools by Automattic

A scheduling tool built for distributed teams

2 followers

A scheduling tool built for distributed teams

2 followers

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Team collaboration software

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Scheduling software

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Remote workforce tools

Distributed teams, changing business needs, and complex dynamics are redefining the workday. Happy Tools makes it possible for your office to run smoothly, no matter what it looks like or who makes it go.

Launch tags:Productivity•Task Management•Calendar

Launch Team

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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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7yr ago

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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7yr ago

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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7yr ago

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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7yr ago

This looks helpful and super solid! Well done team! I've signed up for a demo and looking forward to seeing it in action. Is there now a feature (or is it planned) to be able to assign competencies to teams or individuals, so that they can be automatically shown/hidden when different tasks are in view? Also, is there any "magic button" that will do a best-guess attempt at filling an open schedule based on staff's availability, after which you can tweak as necessary? I'm excited to see what else comes along via happy.tools!

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7yr ago

Jetpack AI Assistant

Maker

@andyconlin Hi Andy! Sorry for the late reply, I somehow missed your comment. Thanks for your kind words! Yes, if I understand the first question correctly I'd say it already works like that. You can arrange the different tasks in groups, and then filter the different views by those groups. For example, if you have two very different types of tasks (let's say customer support on one hand and sysadmin tasks on the other), you can create two separate groups so people that can only work on customer support don't show up when you're assigning sysadmin work, and viceversa. This is what we use to keep our different products separate (WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, etc) while allowing people to move from one to the other easily and keeping reports consistent. About the auto-scheduling, there isn't at the moment but it's definitely something we would love to implement at some point. Doing it correctly is a huge challenge, though, so we are focusing on the other struggles around scheduling (for example, vacation planning) before adding it to the roadmap.

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7yr ago