Rebuilding dispatch for 4,000 field teams
Crewdock schedules plumbers, electricians and heating engineers for 4,000 service companies. Dispatchers planned every day by phone and spreadsheet. We rebuilt the board around a single question: who can take this job next?
Role: Lead product designer
Scheduling
90 s
to schedule a job, down from 6 minutes
Errors
−38%
dispatcher errors in the first quarter
Throughput
+24%
jobs per technician per day
App rating
3.1 → 4.6 stars for the technician app
Measured six months after launch
(01) The problem
Dispatchers spent 40% of their day on the phone, asking who was free. The old board showed jobs, not people. Leadership wanted automation, dispatchers wanted to stay in control, and both were right.
40%
of a dispatcher’s day on the phone
3
calls to place one urgent job
1
shared spreadsheet for parts and people
(02) Approach
Four steps, each with a number we agreed on before we started.
01 · Shadow the dispatchers
Two weeks in three dispatch rooms. We logged every call, spreadsheet and sticky note to see where a day actually went.
02 · Find the one decision
Most work was a single question: who can take this job next? Every screen was redesigned around answering it.
03 · Prototype on real data
We tested the board with last month’s jobs, not dummy data, so dispatchers judged it on their own work.
04 · Ship in slices
Suggestions shipped first, then drag-to-assign, then the technician app. Each slice had a success metric before it shipped.
(03) What I learned
Three things I took to the next project.
(05) Kind words
Joana Pires
VP Operations, Crewdock
Tom Keller
Engineering Manager, Ledgerline
Aisha Naidoo
Head of Product, Tendwell
“Mara walked into the messiest part of our product and left it calmer. Dispatchers stopped calling us to ask how to use it.”
Joana Pires · VP Operations, Crewdock
