The 'Uncool' Problems in Business

Recently, my husband and I were discussing Wheelocity, a promising Chennai based startup that's building an efficient supply chain for fresh fruits and vegetables. In India, we waste ~40% of our produce in the post harvest supply chain. The opportunity is so huge and so, we were both wondering why we don't hear more about people solving these problems.

And, the answer was clear. This wasn't "cool." Don't get me wrong, but while GenAI and LLMs might be super cool tech, it's seemingly common sense that most business value is created in solving the 'uncool' problems and making improvements in everyday processes.

I proudly remember one of my first initiatives as a program manager at Amazon about five years ago, where we had observed that one of our partner's delivery truck visiting our warehouse every other day was half empty, given that we had just started off and our order volumes were smaller. Over the next week, I researched multiple delivery van options, spoke to vendors and reviewed the standard cost per month (I wasn't an ops person). Post that, I presented my analyses and we persuaded our partner to switch to the right sized vehicle and transfer the cost savings to our company. It brought small but substantial improvements in our unit economics.

While we do and should continue to celebrate the next launch of the dark mode feature, the cool Apple Vision Pro tech and so on, we sometimes forget to acknowledge the real work that goes in making small marginal improvements and the "uncool" work done by millions of non-product managers and non-AI companies around the world to help us run our everyday lives better.