Float Capacity Planning Tool

Resource planning at a creative studio is deceptively hard. Float holds the data, but surfacing it quickly — filtered by team, role, and availability window — requires jumping through enough hoops that producers often just Slack around instead. This tool changes that by wrapping the Float API in a purpose-built interface tuned for how Instrument actually works.

How it works

The tool offers three search modes: preset views for common audiences (Brand Studio design dept, IC designers only, all Brand Studio roles, Google REP), guided filters for tag/department/title/minimum open %, and natural-language search that parses plain English — “designers in brand studio with 20% open next two weeks” — into structured Float queries. All Float API calls happen server-side via Netlify Functions, keeping the API key out of the browser entirely. Capacity math is straightforward but precise: open hours = capacity hours minus task allocation hours minus time-off hours, calculated per person across the selected date window.

What’s under the hood

The frontend is deliberately lightweight — static HTML, vanilla JS, and a CSS design system built with Instrument Sans and Instrument Serif that matches the agency’s own brand. The results table sorts by open percentage, includes next-open-date calculations, and exposes a CSV export for staffing, producer, and retainer workflows. A separate Netlify Function endpoint — figjam-capacity — proxies Float data directly into a FigJam plugin, since Figma plugin iframes can’t call Float’s API due to CORS restrictions. One codebase, two surfaces.

Iterating in the open

This project is built and refined incrementally — the video update captured here added three distinct Brand Studio preset scopes after discovering that the original single preset was missing people due to API pagination limits and over-narrow title matching. Each iteration is a spot-check loop: pull the data, verify against Float manually, find the edge case, fix the filter logic, repeat. The pagination fix alone significantly expanded the breadth of people surfacing in results.

Why it matters

Tools like this close the gap between data that exists and decisions that get made. When finding available designers takes thirty seconds instead of a Slack thread, producers staff projects faster and with more confidence. The same pattern — Float API proxied through serverless functions, filtered by org-specific presets, exported to CSV or piped into design tools — could apply to any agency running resource management through Float.