I co-led the product design for the Capacity Planning effort, which gives field service Planners peace of mind when planning months ahead for a large workforce.
the problem
Salesforce Field Service powers enterprise-scale operations; utility companies, telecom crews, HVAC fleets. The Planner is responsible for making sure there are enough people to show up, weeks and months from now. When the Dispatcher's horizon is a few weeks at most, the Planner is the only one looking further ahead. And until now, she's been doing it blind.
connecting with users
The Planner isn't a cut and dry role. They can be a utility operations lead in Texas during wildfire season or a telecom planner managing mutual aid agreements after a hurricane. We mapped their workflows, their pain points, and the moments when the job became impossible. What emerged wasn't a list of feature requests; it was a picture of a role that had been set up without the right tool to ensure success.
Affinity mapping workshop that I co-led and included participants from several teams including Product, Design and Research.
what research revealed
We used Claude and NotebookLM to synthesize customer VOCs, Solution Engineer interviews, UX research documents and meeting records into clear, actionable themes. Here is what the data kept saying:
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.
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
Inefficient scheduling isn't a minor inconvenience for Planners. It compounds. Overtime costs mount, repeat visits erode customer trust, and reactive crisis management becomes the default mode of operation. These numbers aren't hypothetical. They're what the industry accepts as normal.
There are two ways Planners can respond to a capacity gap: prevent it from forming, or react when it arrives. Capacity Limits was our first step into Preventative gap resolution; 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?
proof of concept
The Capacity Limits Dashboard wasn't the endgame. It was the proof of concept. A daily and weekly view that let Planners compare consumed hours against limits, at a glance, across work types. For the first time, she had something to look at before the storm arrived, not after.
The Capacity Limits dashboard was Planners' first real signal. It proved the concept before we built the system.
Before finalizing anything, we mapped every boundary condition Planners might face: overlapping territories, skill mismatches, demand spikes, partial outages. All to make sure the design held up under real-world pressure.
The final Capacity Planning dashboard was designed around a single principle: Planners should be able to land, understand their situation, and take action without friction. The AI Gap Resolution Agent is there to take on the load; with guardrails the Planner controls.
Capacity planning
Video demo
AI-anchored proactive alerts lead the landing experience and help surface the highest priority tasks for the Planner. They can select a given territory or several territories and compare the demand vs. capacity.
Custom agents can be created and assigned with relevant permissions. The gap breakdown displays the addressable gap by the agent, while part of the gap is only addressable with human action as some service appointments are locked by limitations.
By exposing the agent's playbook and hard limits upfront, planners can trust that spend, overtime, and scope stay within policy. The approval triggers also reduce risk for the business, since edge cases (high spend, excessive overtime, scope drift) automatically escalate to a human rather than executing unchecked.
A before & after comparison provides transparency regarding skills, utilization and demand coverage. It closes the loop on the original alert the Planner saw while clarifying the process and impact.
Planners can monitor agents' progress as it works through the gap it was assigned. The user can discuss or adjust the playbook with Agentforce during the task, and can also ask to see live trend data.
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