Dilith Dinesh

Most product teams learn about customer problems through tickets, NPS scores, and quarterly reviews.

I spent two years inside the operational layer of one vertical, sitting with contractors, mapping how they actually collect money, watching where workflows break before anyone files a bug report.

What that taught me wasn't roofing. It was that the leverage in a product is almost never in the feature list. It's in the operational moment nobody has instrumented yet. It's the moment where a stretched human decides whether the business makes money that day.

That is also where AI earns its place or fails. In field service, the moment is dispatch. In dental, it's a phone ringing at a front desk that's already short-staffed. I'm at VoiceStack now, working on it with AI at the center, where the caller is often in pain, the compliance surface is real, and an AI that loops instead of helping is worse than no AI at all.

My experience is B2B: software sold to businesses, where the user is paid to stay. I'm increasingly curious about consumer products, where the same question applies to someone who can simply close the app. My AI Shopping Buddy spec started there.

It took two years to learn the first vertical. I expect the second to take just as long, and I'd rather say that than pretend otherwise.