About a month ago, my wife and I moved to Zambia. It has brought us into a completely new season, and it has pushed me further into something I have wanted to pursue for a long time: building practical systems that create value and improve working life.
Soon after arriving, I kept hearing a familiar complaint about deskless workers: unless someone tells them exactly what to do, the work often does not happen.
But watching the gardener at our own home made me question whether the real problem was a lack of initiative.
When I gave him clear instructions, the work got done. The gap was not necessarily willingness. It was the difference between what I expected and what he understood a successful day to look like.
That led me to a simple thesis:
When recurring work is clearly scheduled, communicated through a familiar channel and followed by a simple feedback loop, the baseline quality and consistency of that work should improve.
GardenOps is my first attempt to test that thesis in the real world.
A homeowner can plan recurring work, while the gardener receives clear instructions through WhatsApp. The gardener can then report whether the work was completed, partly completed or blocked by a problem.
The goal is not to place complicated technology in front of someone. It is to use technology quietly in the background to make work clearer, better managed and easier to measure.
Six homeowners are now preparing to test GardenOps with their gardeners. This is where the idea meets real work for the first time.
The biggest question is no longer whether I can build the system. It is whether the system is simple enough for people to understand, useful enough to change behaviour and valuable enough for someone to pay for.
That is what the next testing phase needs to reveal.
One lesson already stands out: building has become far more accessible through AI, but understanding the problem has become even more important. AI can help create the system, but it cannot replace getting close to the people, workflows and frustrations the system is meant to serve.
This letter will follow that process. Once a month, I will share a problem I have noticed, the thesis behind it, what I am building or testing, and what the evidence is teaching me.
GardenOps is the first case study, but the wider journey is about building practical systems that make work better managed, more meaningful and more measurable.
Right now, I would particularly value introductions to business owners or managers in Zambia who oversee recurring deskless work, especially where operations still rely heavily on paper, manual reporting or WhatsApp messages.
I would like to understand how those businesses currently work before assuming what they need.
Thanks for following from the beginning.
Jason
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