mattwatsonkc.bsky.social
Founder/CTO for 20 years, Bootstrapped a SaaS company to a 9 figure exit, CEO of Full Scale, Teaching People to Scale Engineering teams
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Want to learn the framework for perfect market timing?
This article breaks down exactly how to know when the market is ready for your product.
https://buff.ly/3EObune
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What teams actually need is someone to ensure they're working on the right things.
Project management is an artifact of older ways of working.
It made sense when we were building bridges.
But software is different - it requires constant strategic direction, not just task tracking.
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Projects scale linearly - more customers = more work.
But products? They scale value delivery without scaling cost.
Software is expensive to build but costs almost nothing to run.
Build once, sell many times.
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Don't get me wrong - technical decisions matter.
But they rarely matter as much as we think they do in the moment.
What matters more is getting real solutions in front of real customers.
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The same thing happened at Stackify.
While our competitors were perfecting their systems, we were shipping solutions.
Speed won.
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At VinSolutions, we grew to $35M ARR using a tech stack that other CTOs would probably mock.
But you know what? Our customers didn't care about our architecture.
They cared that we solved their problems faster than our competitors.
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Nobody wants to be the person who picked the wrong framework or database that the team has to live with for years.
But, in most cases, your choice of tech stack matters way less than your speed to market.
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Have you hit this wall yet?
How are you balancing stability and innovation?
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Most growing software companies can't choose between maintenance and innovation.
They need both.
The solution isn't choosing one or the other.
It's building the right team and processes to handle both effectively.
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If you're a technical leader feeling this pain right now, share your biggest challenge below - I'd love to help you avoid the mistakes I made.
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This transition is one of the hardest challenges technical founders face.
Your strengths become your limitations.
Your attention to detail becomes a bottleneck.
Your high standards start slowing down delivery.
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At some point, you need to shift from being the person who builds everything to the person who builds the team that builds everything.
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The hard truth:
If your team can't make decisions without you, you haven't built a team.
You've built order-takers.
And order-takers don't scale.
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Everything changed when I learned to let go:
Teams solved problems I didn't know existed
Innovation came from every level
Decisions happened closer to the work
People grew into leaders
I could focus on strategy
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Why we're building it
Who we're building it for
What success looks like
Which trade-offs matter most
Where we can be flexible
These insights don't come from reading documents.
They come from meaningful dialogue.
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Want to know how? Check out this episode of Product Driven where I break down the framework: https://buff.ly/3Qm1zaZ
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You can't just tell engineers to "speak up more."
You have to build an environment where challenging ideas isn't just allowed - it's expected.
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Leading a dev team? I'd love to hear your biggest communication challenges.
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Teams that get this right build better products faster, with less rework and fewer misunderstandings.
Want the complete framework?
Watch the latest Product Driven episode where I break down exactly how to implement this: https://buff.ly/3Qm1zaZ
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3️⃣ Focus on outcomes over outputs.
Stop measuring features shipped and start measuring problems solved.
This shifts the conversation from "what to build" to "why we're building it."