Case study · Project year 2025
Timeo
Scheduling SaaS for independent restaurants and cafés: bring availability and coverage together, generate a draft, and review it before sharing.
My role: Founder and full-stack product engineer
Outcome
Pilot users reduced schedule planning from about 3 hours to around 20 minutes.
A rota that a manager can review
Independent restaurant and café managers have to reconcile staff availability with kitchen and floor coverage. A last-minute absence changes the plan, but it should not force the manager to reconstruct the whole week from messages and spreadsheets.
I founded and built Timeo as a scheduling SaaS. My contribution spans the product interface and scheduling workflow: collecting the planning inputs, producing a candidate rota, and making the result available for review and sharing. The current public product is focused on hospitality; earlier retail demonstrations represent a previous presentation of the product.
Decisions and constraints
The workflow makes availability and coverage explicit before generating a draft. That gives a manager concrete inputs to correct when the result needs work. The review step matters: a generated assignment is a proposal, and the manager still needs to check staffing and applicable requirements before sharing it.
The public example uses four fictional people and a preset replacement when Alex becomes unavailable on Friday. This makes the interaction easy to explore without an account or real employee information. It runs in the browser and does not invoke the scheduling solver; it demonstrates the review interaction rather than measuring solver quality or speed.
Evaluation and outcome
The pilot observation was a reduction in schedule preparation from about three hours to around 20 minutes for pilot users. It is an observed planning-time result, not a randomized study or a guarantee for every restaurant. The public evidence does not include a sample size, distribution of timings, or a reproducible timing protocol.
On 6 September 2026, the public sample was checked by changing Friday availability and updating the draft. The changed floor assignment and visible review messaging are evidence that the sample interaction works. They do not establish authenticated scheduling performance, legal compliance, customer revenue, or retention.
The manager’s review loop
- 01
Planning inputs
Staff availability and kitchen/floor coverage.
- 02
Candidate rota
Generate a draft; inspect assignments and gaps.
- 03
Review and share
Resolve changes before sharing the week with staff.
Technology focus
- Optimization
- Product
- Operations AI
Evidence and further reading
Evidence reviewed . Project year is separate from this review date.
- Try Timeo’s fictional restaurant rota (opens in new tab)
Public product and browser-only example, checked 6 September 2026. Pilot timing remains an owner-reported observation.