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 newsletter.productdriven.com Kansas City, MO Joined October 2021

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

22 hours ago

One client: 15% → 0.5% deployment failures. How? Stopped making India wait for US. Stopped blocking EU with Philippines. Async architecture for async teams. Revolutionary, right?

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

23 hours ago

My 16 year old is learning the hard lessons fast. 😂 What should I make him do next?

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

a day ago

2 developers. 90 days until Black Friday. They need 15... Traditional hiring says "impossible." They tried something different: Trial projects. Real work. Fast decisions. 90 days later: 15 developers. $3M revenue. "Perfect" hiring would've missed Black Friday entirely. Speed…

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

2 days ago

"Vibe coding" isn't "vibe startup creation." Creating code doesn't create a product or business. There are thousands of products or "side projects" on Product Hunt, X and Reddit that have zero customers. Creating a business requires creating a go to market strategy that works…

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

2 days ago

We pretend distributed teams work in one timezone. Then wonder why deployments fail. Event-driven architecture isn't fancy. It's survival when your team spans 12 timezones.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

2 days ago

You can save $50K/month just from eliminating emergency fixes. Distributed teams don't need more process. They need less coupling. Your 3am calls are architecture failures, not people failures.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

3 days ago

The most expensive distributed team problems? The ones nobody can see. Stop buying collaboration tools. Start monitoring. When everyone sees the same metrics, problems VANISH.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

3 days ago

2-second API calls. Three teams pointing fingers. One Redis cache nobody saw. We give remote teams Slack when they need dashboards. Visibility kills finger-pointing.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

4 days ago

Manila blamed Mumbai. Mumbai blamed Miami. Miami blamed Manila. Reality: Misconfigured Redis nobody owned. Distributed teams don't need another collaboration tool. They need VISIBILITY.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

4 days ago

Technical correctness ≠ product success. Your perfectly engineered solution is worthless if it perfectly solves the wrong problem. Maybe care about users, not just code?

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

4 days ago

90% of startups fail. Big companies don't innovate. Do you think the traditional way of building software products is the right way?

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

5 days ago

That feature your team is proud of? The one with zero bugs? Ask them who uses it. If they can't name 5 customers, you're not building products. You're building résumés 🤷‍♂️

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

5 days ago

6 months. Perfect code. But only 12 users... Meanwhile your competitor's garbage MVP raised $50M. Your users don't care about your GitHub stars. They care about their problems.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

5 days ago

My 16-year-old wants to be a software engineer. The first task I gave him? Build a web page and try to get elements to line up. Welcome to the hardest part of building software. Writing code is the easy part. Making a design actually look right on the screen? Still a…

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

6 days ago

Hire slow, fire fast? That advice was built for factories with 18-month cycles. Software ships every 2 weeks. While you're on interview round 5, your competitor shipped 20 features and stole your market. The math: Bad hires cost $30K. Slow hiring costs $495K. Choose wisely.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

6 days ago

How do you get from 12 midnight escalations → 1? Let Philippines deploy without US approval. Let India fix without EU meetings. Autonomy beats coordination every single time.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

7 days ago

Here's what actually keeps engineers: Purpose. Impact. Understanding how their code changes someone's day. Knowing they're building something that matters. Give your team a reason to care. Or watch them find someone who will.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

a week ago

Client went from 3-4 hours monthly downtime to 4 minutes. The secret: Stop treating distributed teams like they're in the same building. Different continents need different architectures.

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Matt Watson @mattwatsonkc

a week ago

Everyone wants autonomous teams—until they realize what that actually looks like. You give teams ownership. You stop micromanaging. You trust them to do what’s right. And then… Team A builds toward Q4 goals Team B’s chasing an exec pet project Team C is optimizing for their…