Fountain Shift discovery

How customer conversations helped shape Fountain Shift

In early 2024, Fountain Labs, then Fountain's early product discovery team, set out to learn how hourly teams build schedules, cover call-outs and get new hires to their first shift. We interviewed operators and industry advisors, then worked with Fountain's product and design teams on prototypes and in regular working sessions with a customer design partner. That work fed into Fountain Shift, the scheduling product that Fountain's product and engineering teams built and launched.

See Fountain Shift

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The problem

Hiring does not end at the offer. When the first shift is slow to schedule, hourly teams risk losing new hires. Managers often cover call-outs by hand. Hiring plans count heads, not the specific shifts that are short. And hiring and scheduling often sit in separate tools with separate owners, so the two rarely line up.

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What we built

A discovery interview guide built around the problem, not the solution: how schedules get made, how call-outs get covered, and how scheduling affects retention.
Discovery interviews in spring 2024 with operators in quick service restaurants, delivery, logistics and retail, plus sessions with industry advisors.
Early concepts and clickable prototypes, built with Fountain's product designers, for building a schedule, timesheets, scheduling rules and filling open shifts.
A co-design partnership with a customer, testing prototypes in regular working sessions against real scheduling, timesheet and attendance needs.
A session with a frontline worker about picking up, swapping and dropping shifts, and about clocking in and out.

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How it works

Spot the signal: scheduling is a gap between hiring and a new hire's first shift.
Listen first: interview operators and industry advisors about how scheduling works today.
Prototype: work with Fountain's product designers to turn what we heard into clickable designs customers can react to.
Co-design: refine the prototypes with a customer design partner, alongside the product team.
Hand off: product and engineering build it, and a beta team runs it with early customers.

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Where it landed

Fountain Shift is a live Fountain product, announced publicly in December 2025.
A beta with early customers covered schedules, timesheets, a worker portal and scheduling rules.
Scheduling now sits in the same platform as Fountain's hiring and onboarding tools.

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What we learned

Speed to first shift matters. The longer it takes to get a new hire on the schedule, the more likely they are to drop off.
Schedule fit matters alongside pay. We heard that workers will leave for better hours at similar pay.
Hiring teams often know how many people they need, but not which shifts are short.
Call-outs are often covered by hand. Managers want to reach qualified, available workers quickly.
New hires meet many tools at once in their first week, which can be confusing.