Artifact: Problem Statement — Kestrel Scheduling Request

A vague request ("can you make scheduling easier?") turned into a problem statement -- exercises co-02. Kestrel is a fictional product; every quoted number, question, or finding here is an illustrative, constructed example, not real data or a real transcript.

Problem statement: Restaurant shift managers who build next week's schedule every Thursday afternoon -- juggling a paper availability list and a scattered thread of staff text messages -- currently spend 40-60 minutes per week on it and still make 1-2 double-booking mistakes a month. We want both the time spent and the mistake rate down. This statement does not yet commit to any specific redesign of the scheduling flow, an availability-collection feature, or a conflict checker -- which of those (if any) is worth building is a separate, later decision.