How I redesigned a brittle legacy feature into a dynamic, user-friendly system—cutting shift-related support tickets by 80% and making factory data truly usable.

🎬 ACT 1: “We Keep Getting the Same Ticket”

It started with a comment in Slack from one of the support engineers.

“Hey—anyone know why shift scheduling is confusing so many customers?”

That opened the floodgates.

I pulled the metrics:

• 80%+ of shift-related support tickets were not bugs
• They were workarounds—users asking for help editing schedules
• Some manufacturers were literally changing their real-world shifts to fit how our system worked

At MachineMetrics, our platform turned real-time machine data into actionable insights. But our shift system—used to define when machines were running—was rigid:

• One schedule per account
• 24/7 coverage required
• No per-machine customization
• No interface for overlap validation or error handling

It was a system built on assumptions—not on reality.