The PM's Antidote: Stop Dreaming of Changing the World. Just Solve 'The Grocery Run'.
Source: Dev.to
If you stay in product management long enough, you catch a specific virus: Change the World Syndrome.
We preach disruptive innovation in our slides, justify billion‑dollar TAMs in our weekly syncs, and scoff at small tools for having “no competitive moat.” We’re trained to think high‑level, to seek “underlying logic,” to “empower industries.”
This grand narrative is intoxicating, but the reality? Most of us are crushed by the Sunday grocery run long before we ever make a dent in the universe.
The Trap of Grand Narratives
We’ve been lied to. The tech industry sells a value system where only platforms, ecosystems, and large language models are “real work.” Building an app to organize a grocery list is “thinking small” and supposedly lacking vision.
Yet indie hackers often make their first dollar while senior PMs at big tech are still polishing roadmaps. Cooking starts long before the pan heats up—in those chaotic moments of scribbling ingredients, wondering what to make, and wandering the store trying to remember which aisle holds the tahini. These tiny moments are real and exhausting.
When I code, I think of that feather in Forrest Gump: it has no grand destination, no complex navigation system. It just drifts with the wind and lands gently, existing in the moment.
The Power of Tiny Pain Points
My friends’ phones are full of “life‑changing” apps—the same ones I once aspired to build: apps to hack sleep, manage time, achieve financial freedom. But the apps they actually open, the ones that make them feel lighter, are often the “boring” ones.
In a world of grand narratives and corporate gaslighting, we’re exhausted. The mental load of “the list” is heavier than we admit. We don’t need a tool to manage health big data; we need a tool that says, “Get the milk, it’s in Aisle 3.”
That’s the antidote: quiet helpers that make us feel lighter, not tools that promise to make us “better.”
Not a Chef, But a Quiet Helper
This is why I built DishPal.
DishPal won’t teach you to cook, nor will it become a social network for foodies. It simply wants those chaotic in‑between moments to feel lighter. You tell it what you want to cook—type a meal name or paste a messy recipe—and its AI quietly parses it, organizing every ingredient by aisle‑like categories.
“No more juggling notes, no more mental math. Just describe what you want, and let a quiet helper turn that into a clear, organized list. It sorts by aisle so you flow through the store, rather than zigzagging like a lost tourist.”
In an age of data‑hungry corporations, DishPal stays quiet in another way: it’s privacy‑first. Your API keys stay on your device; your data is yours.
I don’t expect DishPal to change the world, but if it saves you 10 minutes hunting for spices or stops you from forgetting the one thing you actually went to the store for, that’s enough. Tiny happiness is the new grand.
Final Words
A suggestion for every product manager and indie developer still anxious about their legacy:
Come down from the clouds. Look at the ignored, real, concrete, even “stupid” needs around you. That is where your opportunity hides.
Don’t try to reinvent the future of food. Just help someone buy dinner.