Matt Watson
@mattwatsonkc
Entrepreneur, Startup CTO/CEO, Bootstrapped to a 9 figure SaaS exit, founder of @fullscalekc, subscribe to my newsletter about product thinking for engineers
You might like
Most engineering leaders are just developers pretending to know management. We all needed a playbook. So I wrote one ➡️ productdriven.com/book Readers say it changed the game. See for yourself.
If you treat developers like interchangeable resources, you’ll always be stuck in onboarding mode. When you treat them like long-term teammates, context compounds, trust builds, and velocity finally stabilizes. That’s the difference between renting output and earning outcomes.…
AI can teach you how to fill a propane tank. It won’t give you the experience to not smoke while doing it. Knowing how to do something isn’t the same as knowing what not to do. Experience still matters. Judgment still matters. AI can teach the steps. It can’t teach the scars.
AI was probably invented by a dev who got tired of writing regular expressions.
There’s a big difference between a team that **ships** and a team that **scales**. A team that ships can push code. A team that scales can do it *consistently*, sprint after sprint, without burning out or starting over every quarter. I’m breaking down how to build that kind of…
On a podcast yesterday, someone asked me: “How much context do software engineers really need?” My answer was simple. Usually, it only takes five extra minutes. Five minutes to write it in a ticket. Five minutes to explain it in a planning meeting. Five minutes to share why it…
It’s easy to mistake complexity for progress. “Let’s build the whole platform.” “Let’s add that edge case—just in case.” But speed doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from clarity. Focus. Solving what actually matters to users. Do fewer things. Do them right the first time.…
Adding more devs to one backlog won’t speed you up—it stalls you. The CTOs we work with are doubling velocity by running parallel pods instead. Full story 👉 buff.ly/gwQ47Yt
AI doesn't make developers code faster. It makes them think differently. Before AI: Our developers spent 80% writing code, 20% solving problems With AI: They spend 30% writing code, 70% solving business problems Not so surprisingly, the devs who benefit most aren't the best…
Why do teams move slower right after hiring? Because more headcount ≠ more velocity. One giant backlog → chaos, meetings, and stalled delivery. The problem isn’t hiring. It’s structure. I’ll share the model that fixes this in the next newsletter.
If AI is your junior dev… Who’s becoming your next senior? We used to train developers through apprenticeship— Writing glue code, fixing bugs, learning by doing. Now AI does the entry-level work. And we’re skipping the part where real devs get built. This won’t just hurt…
What kind of company does Product Driven thinking work in? All of them. Startups. SaaS. Enterprise. Dev shops. B2B. B2C. Doesn’t matter. When product & engineering don’t think together, everything slows down. 📉 Startups waste sprints. 📉 Growth teams ship features that don’t…
Simple often just means "I get it." Complex means "I don’t." Because not all complexity is bad. Some of it is the result of good design: – Clean abstractions – Modularity – Smart composition If the system is built from understandable parts… But the sum feels complex… Is it…
You can’t wait for a crisis to figure out how you’ll handle one. A 7.6 earthquake hit just 30 miles from our Philippines HQ — and 8,000 miles from our U.S. one. It tested everything we’ve built: our systems, our communication, our culture. Here’s how we protected our people…
United States Trends
- 1. GTA 6 61K posts
- 2. GTA VI 21.6K posts
- 3. Rockstar 53K posts
- 4. Antonio Brown 5,931 posts
- 5. GTA 5 8,769 posts
- 6. Nancy Pelosi 129K posts
- 7. Ozempic 19.2K posts
- 8. Paul DePodesta 2,201 posts
- 9. Rockies 4,191 posts
- 10. #LOUDERTHANEVER 1,519 posts
- 11. Silver Slugger 3,709 posts
- 12. Grisham 1,845 posts
- 13. GTA 7 1,365 posts
- 14. Free AB N/A
- 15. Justin Dean 1,889 posts
- 16. Kanye 26.1K posts
- 17. Grand Theft Auto VI 44.7K posts
- 18. Elon 396K posts
- 19. Fickell 1,119 posts
- 20. RFK Jr 31.3K posts
Something went wrong.
Something went wrong.