I'm gonna go ahead and give the saltiest response you can imagine. You can't ask companies about what problems they are facing. You can only ask individuals, a

I'm gonna go ahead and give the saltiest response you can imagine. You can't ask companies about what problems they are facing. You can only ask individuals, and their responses will be colored by their perspective. If you talk to the people that have the power to fix the problems, you're going to get the perspective of ladder climbers that can only ever tell you what problems should be solved in order to further their career. If you want to solve problems that the company is facing, you will only find the problems by asking the people that are powerless to solve them. Mostly people on the ground floor that work in the trenches solving massive problems on an ad hoc but daily basis, but occasionally people that are higher up but marooned and destined to be fired at some point. An example from my past: A VP tasked with improving operations performance saw some bottlenecks in warehouse employee productivity, and a potential solution in a robotics product. He ended up betting his career on outright buying the robotics company, without even testing out the product in the company's warehouses. As it turned out, integrating the product was extremely difficult...it involved tradeoffs that forced re-arranging how products were stored, what product mixes could be stored in which warehouses, how inventory was modeled and managed, and how inventory was surfaced to the customer. Basically, the product improved worker productivity by small margins, and increased inventory, software, and most of all logistics costs dramatically. BTW, those logistics cost increases overshadowed the productivity gains by a 5:1 margin. But he accomplished his goal, and any criticism of how he accomplished it is just a detail to manage. If you ask someone in Ops, they will say they need to make a few major software improvements. If you ask someone in software, they will say they need better QA and access to the robotics engineers, and to simplify their logistics for easier modeling. If you ask someone in inventory management, you'll need bigger warehouses and major re-organization of warehouse inventory design. If you ask someone in logistics, they will say they need to re-arrange the warehouses better. If you ask the VP, you'll need incremental improvements in robot speed. If you ask the VP's boss, he'll say he doesn't care, as long as he gets improvement. But funnily enough, if you ask the guy who was the technical architect at the acquired robotics company, he'll say you need to cut your losses, revert course until you can recover your logistics costs, and either invest massive development in a different technology with a better fit to the application, or buy a different company that already had it developed. He got fired for saying this, by the way. No way the VP could ever be made to admit to his mistake. To this day, the VP talks to the press about how much money they're saving due to this thingamajigger that he bought. He'll take it to his grave.