The Ownership Crisis with Matt Watson & Grant McGaugh

If your teams are shipping fast but the business still feels stuck, the problem probably is not talent or tooling. It is ownership. Grant McGaugh talks with five-time founder and Full Scale CEO Matt Watson about why companies quietly trade ownership for activity, then wonder why outcomes stall even when the roadmap stays full.

We get practical about personal branding and LinkedIn strategy, too. Matt shares how he built an audience of more than 70,000 followers by showing up with a clear point of view, earning trust, and avoiding the spammy playbook that floods inboxes. If you sell a service, lead a team, or run a startup, you will hear why being “best known” can matter more than being “best,” and how thought leadership turns into a real pipeline when you do it with consistency.

Then we go inside the product-driven leadership mindset behind Matt’s book, Product Driven: Reconnect Engineers to Customers, Kill the Assembly-Line Handoffs, and Replace Ticket Management with Business Problem Solving. We also tackle AI in software engineering and why faster code does not equal faster innovation when bureaucracy and unclear decisions create friction. Matt breaks down the leadership essentials of vision, focus, and clarity, plus what it takes to scale through delegation without becoming the hero bottleneck.

Subscribe for more conversations on leadership, brand, and growth, share this with a founder or engineering leader, and leave a quick review if it helped. What is the biggest thing blocking ownership on your team right now?

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

See you next time on Follow The Brand!

Transcript

Welcome And The Real Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Follow Brand Podcast. This is Grant McGall coming from the Midwest in Omaha, Nebraska. And I get to talk to one of my other fellow Midwestern people in the Kansas City area. A lot of people don't realize, you know, Omaha, Kansas City. They don't know the distance. It's just like you know, me coming from Florida, Miami, and Orlando. It's about the same distance. About a two and a half, three-hour drive. That's really it. You know, so yes, I am a Kansas City fan. I do like the Kansas City Chiefs. I'm a little bummed out right now about what happened to Mahone, but they'll they'll they'll they will bounce back and they will bounce back with um a lot more vigor than a lot of people will realize. But we're gonna have a candid conversation today. Because I don't think a lot of companies realize some of these things that we're gonna talk about, because most companies they don't fail because they lack talent. I think they fail because the closest people to the work are the furthest from the decision. And if you don't make those decisions right, you can have some problems. So today's conversation is about patterns, about repeating itself across startups, scale-ups, or even large enterprises, teams that are busy, they're well staffed, they might be shipping constantly, but they're still missing the mark because we've normalized speed in our tech stack, we've we've optimized for output. And in the process, I think many leaders have partly traded ownership for activity. And I think today's guest, you're gonna talk to, we're gonna be talking to Matt Watson. And Matt is a five-time founder, former CTO, and current CEO of Full Scale, where he's built and scaled engineering teams across multiple high-growth companies and successful exits. And he's also the author of Product Driven, which is a book written for leaders who are tired of managing tickets and want teams to think like owners. I think that's very, very important to understand. So I'd like to welcome Matt to the Follow Brand Podcast. Matt, would you like to introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Hey, thanks so much for having me. You know, I'm just a guy looking for something to do for problems to solve, man. That's that's been my entire life. I'm just give me a hard

Be The Best Known

SPEAKER_01 2:25

problem and a challenge, and I'll go solve it.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Well, let's start out with the thing we just talked about, which I liked about you. And we're talking about business and the the personal brand, understanding brand, understanding the market. You told me just moments ago that a owner or a CEO's first mission is to market themselves. Talk to me more about that.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Well, one of the best videos I ever saw on TikTok, and I tell people this all the time. I think it's my best advice for other entrepreneurs is you don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the best known for what you do. Nobody knows the best plumber that lives in their town, but they know the one that runs the most ads, that has the trucks driving down their street, right? Nobody knows the best at anything, but they know the best known, right? Life and business is all about be you know, the exposure of your hard work and the marketing. Even if you're just you know an employee at a company, if no, if if your manager doesn't know you're doing a great job, it it doesn't matter either, right? It's all about the exposure of your hard work and your expertise, right? At at every kind of level of life, I feel like.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Well, you have built out, and I I gotta tit your horn just a little bit because I went to your LinkedIn page and said, wow, this guy has 75,000 people that find him interesting. I'm like, why? Why do these 75,000 people find Matt so interesting? He's doing engineering work where for some people might find that you know very boring, boring, you know, coding and things like that, and building digital systems. How are you able to build your brand to that level?

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Well, so at Full Scale, we do software engineering for other people. And you know, anybody who's listening to this that does kind of software development or product development, you probably get spammed from people every single day from India and other places around the world trying to sell software development services, right? So for us, it's like, well, how do we reach other people? How do we how do we get people to know that my my company exists and build a relationship with them and build trust with them, right? And social media is a way to do that. So LinkedIn is a great way to reach our potential audience, be a thought leader, um, and build that kind of relationship and trust with people we don't know, it which works way better than cold calling or cold email, right? Like spamming people doesn't work. And so, you know, we we really doubled

LinkedIn As A Trust Engine

SPEAKER_01 4:55

down and invested very heavily in LinkedIn over the last three years. So three years ago, I had 15,000 followers, and today I have 73,000 followers on LinkedIn, and we can talk more about like how I do it and what I do and stuff if you want. But yeah, just put a huge focus on LinkedIn and it drives millions of dollars in revenue for us every year in and new business.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

So I want people to really double down what you just said that first of all, you took a space in in a saturated market, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Yeah, we have lots of competitors, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

You know, I mean they're they're out there, especially India and other locations. You need software engineering, like you go, you know, around the corner and get somebody that says, I can do some coding. You said, look, I gotta get out in front of this, and I've got to be able to demonstrate value from my platform because LinkedIn is a platform, right? Yeah, you gotta be able to tell your story, you've got to have your unique point of view. What makes you different from all these other people? You already know, like, yeah, you can go get probably some basic code from someone else, but you've got to be different in in what you do. Like in your book, I think it's called product driven, you describe five foundational like disconnections, like when you walk into an office or an organization or what really shows up and which will land because when I think of digital engineering, even software engineering, you're really emulating the physical world, so to speak, right? And you just do it in a different way. How does your book help to differentiate you in your market?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Well, writing writing the book started over a year ago from our own employees and the struggles that we have with our own employees. So I have 300-something employees, and it's like for our software engineers, which ones do a great job and which ones don't do such a great job? And what is the difference? And how do I train the ones that aren't doing such a great job to be more like the ones that that are, right? And for me, that was that came down to product thinking. It's the ones that speak up, they take ownership of their work, they have an opinion, they care. You know, they're they're not just taking orders, you know, they they think and act more like leaders and owners, right? And through the process of the writing, writing the book, it helped me a lot with self-reflection around how to do that, how to change from a leadership perspective to build a team that thinks that way. Um, and so I think it was the biggest value of writing the book was just my own self-reflection. It's like this is the way I work, but how do I communicate to other people the way that I think and I work, and building a model that they could follow? And and I on accident basically created that the product-driven model, which you mentioned, which was five five important um pieces for for engineering leaders to follow. But you know, you know, the book is about software engineering leadership, but it really applies um to anybody that that kind of works in startups or tech, but the the foundational pieces to it apply to any kind of leadership. But you know, the book is built from that point of view of software engineering leadership, kind of tech leadership.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

I think what you stated there, and I want our audience to really think about this, this is one of the biggest problems, especially when you are owner, you're running a company and you gotta you're running it through other people, is the ownership piece. Do your key people take ownership of what their responsibility is? So if you're the uh director of operations, do you feel like you're just working in operations or do you feel like you own operations and then you can speak to me as if you are a business owner and I'm a business owner, right? And that we can have that business to business discussion and not employer to employee type discussion. I think those are two different communication styles, right? You get somebody that's owning what they're doing, and they can give direct feedback back to you, Matt. Right? You get 300 people. Wouldn't it be great if somebody said, Matt, take a look at this. This is a

Why Product Thinking Wins

SPEAKER_00 9:10

fundamental flaw in what we're doing and how we're engineering this piece. And I want to bring it to your attention because I think we can 10x this, let's just say, and drive more revenue. Would you like to have that discussion?

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yeah, let's go.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

But how do you get people to think like that? That's the that's the thing, you know, take ownership. Don't just because I have a certain title, let's say, or I do own the business, but I'm I'm employing you so that you take ownership of your particular sector, what you do. You're the expert in this world. I am not the expert in that world. So I want to defer to you, listen to what you have to say, that'll potentially enrich all of us in the long run.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

So the challenge is not everybody's gonna do this, right? There are a certain amount of people that, let's be honest, are kind of lazy. They want to do the minimum amount of work, they want to be told what to do, right? Like, and we all have some of those employees, but we also have employees that want to lead, they want to take ownership, right? And we definitely want to foster those people to do so. Um, and the problem, specifically with software engineering, is software engineering is very expensive and slow. And what has happened over the last 25 years is we took this mentality of trying to protect them from everybody else, right? Like literally put them in the basement, turn off the lights, nobody talked to the engineering team, right? We we hired all these project managers, product managers, QA, DevOps people, all these different people to basically do different parts of the work and protect them. And it honestly turned it into an assembly line. Software engineering turned into an assembly line, and the engineers were literally in the dark in the basement and don't understand what they're building, why they're building it. They're completely disconnected from the user, the customer, the they lose all sense of kind of purpose and why they're doing the work, right? And to what you're describing about ownership, like nobody's gonna take ownership of their work if they can't see the value of it. Like, why am I doing this work? Why does this work matter? Can I see the fruit of my labor? Can somebody be excited about the work they did and make me excited about it, make me care about it, give me a purpose, right? And so that's a big part of the book is like from a leadership perspective, that's a leadership problem. If your team doesn't understand who the customer is, why they're doing the work, seeing the outcome and the value of their work, that's a leadership problem. We have to start from a leadership perspective to solve that.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

What you said, we gotta I, you know, take a pause and listen to that. That's that disconnection. I've seen that myself so many times. You have silos of uh working departments, and and because there's not a collective of understanding what it is that we're doing together to make this a better mousetrap, so to speak. And then some of those teams they don't feel like they can need to speak up because they don't know what they're talking about, right? You don't understand the end game that um that we're trying to get to. I I had to learn this myself, like you know, when you start looking at hiring people, you probably understand this because you've got 300 people. People understand the job function that you have. Let's just say someone's paying you, and I'll just use a real round number. Let's say it's a hundred thousand dollars. I'm gonna pay you a hundred thousand dollars to perform this particular job function, right? You say, Oh, that's great. But do you understand that you're that that that what I'm paying you actually do um uh brings to the bottom line three hundred thousand dollars, right? It's a three to one ratio typically, right? In order to bring on an employee and employee role. So when you understand, like, hey, you're a very expensive part of this whole thing that we're doing, I value you and what you bring to the table. I'm not just losing a hundred thousand dollars if you walk out the door, I'm losing three hundred thousand dollars. So, no, we don't want that to happen. But if I'm not communicating that value to you, things happen. And then if you're measuring the wrong things, they think, well, we shipped 800,000 or we we we we we did this very quickly, but did it move the true needle or how did anybody care? Yeah, did anybody care? Did it it has to show

The Assembly Line Engineering Trap

SPEAKER_00 13:45

up somewhere, right? So so in your world, and people are starting to look at this right now, especially when we'll talk about AI, right? The big elephant in the room, there's talking about artificial intelligence. The the goal is is that it makes you more efficient, should make everybody more efficient, and it should bring you instant communication and and intelligence into your into your job function and make you more productive. That's the goal. However, and I know you know this because you're an engineering, just because you can do things um maybe a little faster doesn't mean that you did it right. Like, say you can drive a car 160 miles an hour, but that's not cool if you're going through stop signs, right? So you've got to it's about applied science and applied knowledge and applied skill sets and what it is that you're making things happen. And so, my question in your world how are you managing the AI bubble in software engineering uh for for what you're doing?

SPEAKER_01 14:48

So AI is having a major impact across a lot of different things, right? Like before we started recording today, I'm literally sitting here using AI to help write some code to improve how I do LinkedIn stuff. And I'm using Claude Code and I'm not really writing the code, I'm telling Claude Code to help me help me do this stuff, right? Um, I am a software engineer, but Claude Code is a tool designed to help software engineers. Um, there are a lot of different studies. Some studies will say that it saves software engineers four hours a week, some will say it improves their productivity by 30%. Um the the different statistics that you see are kind of all over the board. But here's the reality the speed at which companies innovate has never been limited by how fast they can write code. How fast you write code has never been the problem. So giving companies tools to help them write code faster doesn't necessarily directly help them innovate any faster. The biggest problem with most companies is just all the organizational friction and bureaucracy and bull crap that goes on that prevents them from getting a single thing accomplished. Right. So, I mean, if you give somebody a Ferrari and tell them they can go as fast as possible, but you put all these limiters in place, they aren't gonna go any faster. Right? Like that is the reality at almost every large company, is all this organizational friction is the problem. And honestly, that's why, like, my book and what I'm trying to preach from an engineering leadership perspective is the key. If you want your teams to go this much faster, you got to give them ownership and get out of the way, right? Like that's the only way we're gonna go faster. And we could have done that without AI, we didn't even need AI for that. We just need to hire smart people, trust them, lead them, guide them, and get out of their way. But nobody does that, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Like nobody does it. That five, that five-letter word, trust. Yeah, so many times, especially with owners that you know they've grown their baby to a certain degree, and they don't won't let the baby just kind of go off on its own to a certain, you know, to do their thing. Like you threw this this department, let's say, of engineers, right? And you you you you know that they can produce good work, but then as you stated, you put all these limiters on them, like, hey, just let them code if that's what they're doing, or let them develop this whole entire uh uh product line, right, on their own and come back to me and show me again and not just talk to me in engineering speed. I think that's another problem, and that's another discussion in the engineering world, because I was a tech guy, I understand it. You talking bits and bytes, you need to be talking in dollars and cents. Like, all right, I hear what you're saying, but how does that translate to finance and business? Because the language of business is finance. Okay, what are you saying? Does that move the bottom line? Remember, I said earlier, if your job function is $100,000 and I know that it costs me $300,000 even to keep that $100,000, how do you make it a million dollars? You know, that I love that discussion, right? So if you start thinking the right way, giving the right um problem to solve, here's our problem. We are, let's say we're a $5 million operation. I want to be a $15 million, a $30 million operation. I want everyone to benefit from that. If that's the goal, and you've communicated that goal, so your goal is not just to make code, your goal really is to help us get to that next plateau of revenue and growth and capital and whatever that may be. So if I get you to start thinking that you are a business

AI Speeds Up Code Not Delivery

SPEAKER_00 18:35

owner and not just a technical component of the team, I think you start to have better output. Now, before you answer that, I think this is where my pet peeves has been for 2025. I am not happy with our educational system. I really am not. Meaning, when I was going through high school and that kind of thing, and I remember a lot of things that I learned. I said, you know what? I am on a monopoly board. When I get out of school and I ring and said I graduated high school and whatever, you didn't tell me, hey Grant, you're on a monopoly board. I have to play Monopoly. I need to understand the game that I am playing. You need to acquire wire assets, you need to get a car, you need to get a home, you need to get a business. Because if you don't, as we say, if all you do is teach me to pass go and collect $200 as the game goes on, that $200 gets less and less in value. That is a losing effort. It'll work like that. So getting back to your point of teaching leadership, not just at your level, and communicating that leadership all the way down to the product line, whoever is in your business. So all 300 of your employees understand the game that we're playing, and we want to play to win.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Well, you mentioned earlier part of the big struggle is talking to engineers. A lot of engineers talk in the bits and the bytes, right? But as leaders, our job is to make sure they understand three things that are really critical. And this is part of my model in the book: vision, focus, and clarity. And so when I say vision, I don't mean some stupid HR vision statement that's on the wall somewhere. I mean, why are we doing this thing this week? Like, why does this matter? What is the vision behind this thing this week? Like, we need to know. Everybody needs to understand what is the vision of what we're trying to accomplish today, right? And then it's focused. Why are we doing this thing and not that thing? Why are we doing this thing? Like, everybody needs to understand what are the trade-offs that we're making. We we decided to do this and not that for these reasons. We decide to do it this way and not that way for these reasons, right? As leaders, everybody's got to know because otherwise they sit around, they're like, why are we doing this stupid thing? We should do this, we should do it this way. Like, I don't understand, my boss is an idiot. But if you tell them all this stuff, they get it. And they're like, they got, you know, they're they're showing and give them some ownership, and that's another part of the model, ownership in the work, right? Ultimately, that makes a big difference. But the the third one there is clarity. That especially for software engineering, it's so easy to get stuck all day long. Like, I figured out how to do this part, but now I got questions. I'm not sure what to do next, right? I'm not sure if they want it this way or that way or whatever. I need to go talk to so-and-so. And so, as leaders, we have to constantly be driving all of this vision, focus, and clarity, right? So that they understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, how to do it, how not to do it, all this kind of stuff. Because if not, they just get stuck at every turn. Because software engineering is not an assembly line, it's a highly creative type of work, right? These are not people that are, you know, stamping out business cards all day long. They're doing highly complicated, creative engineering tasks. And from the engineer's perspective, the one That only speak in bits and bytes are also the software engineers that are not going to make it anymore. That's the other reality. Because as a leader, if I have to go to a software engineer and tell them in some absolute detail about how something's supposed to work, I could basically just tell AI to do it now. That's the reality, right? Software engineers have to think more like product people. They've got to ask questions, they've got to take ownership of their work, they've got to solve the business problems, they got to understand the business problems, right? Software engineers have got to up their game. But the problem with all this is the culture in most of these companies, the engineers aren't allowed to do that. The engineers are order takers. And that's really what my book is about is all of this problem. And you know, so at full scale, this is the problem we're trying to solve. It's like, how do we train our people to think at this higher level, to go from being software engineers, programmers, coders that are going to be replaced by AI? Like they've got to elevate themselves to be product engineers and think at a higher level.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Um because the industry is the I think is is the big elephant in the room for our planet right now, because it's causing all of us to up our game. We've got to get to that next level. If your job is all about just data and your job is all about information, that can be done by an AI type application. But when it comes to context, like you just said, what are we doing it for? The wisdom and experience behind it, the applied knowledge. I love that's why I was like physics. I always go back to high school because I wasn't great at it, but it taught me how to think. It wasn't like you had. That means you had to show your creative thinking. And you most people can't do that, and they don't like doing it. No, because they because we programmed them not to do that, right? Let me do let me do that for you. I just need you to do this little bit over here. But that is not really, as you said earlier, that's not the play anymore. You've got to take it to

Vision Focus And Clarity

SPEAKER_00 24:15

that next level. If even if you're a tech guy, you need to understand more about operations, you need to understand more about finance, you need to understand more about the business and and the market in order to be valuable in what you accomplish.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

So I I saw something one day, I don't remember exactly what it was or what it was about, but it was talking about little kids when they're like five or six years old, are pretty fearless, they're very creative, they will try lots of things, you know, they embrace all of the things that that we really need as adults, right? But somehow, as they grow up, they they sort of take less risk. They're that that sort of that some of that creativity gets lost, they become a little more order takers, follow the rules, you know. And we need more of that spirit of the younger kids, right? That are willing to just try things and be super creative and and build weird things with Legos, right? Like they'll they'll go do all that kind of stuff. And somehow or another in the education system, a lot of that gets lost. And the problem with AI is AI is gonna force all of us to be much more creative, have more of an opinion, and take more risk, right? Like I can ask AI to write me a LinkedIn post, but is it a good one? Is it a bad one? Isn't it a you know, do I want to post it? Right? That that requires all of my own creativity. Um and and the biggest problem for a lot of people is for AI and a lot of kind of business leadership, you've got to know what good looks like. You know, be it you're leading a sales team, a marketing team, any kind of team, as a leader, if you don't know what good looks like, it's really hard to lead those teams. And same thing with AI, like I get output from AI, but is it good? Is it good output or not? Like, you gotta know what good looks like, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 25:58

You still gotta drive the car. I'm gonna go back to what you said and want the audience to really dig into that. Because if you're a young child, I've got a young grandchild, she's like four years old now. If you really observe a young child, what they're really, really good at is imagination. Yeah, they are excellent at imagination, and they're a their their creativity is off the charts. But what we start doing is we start teaching them like, oh, I want you to know your ABCs, I want you to know your one, two, threes. You start getting them into the analytical mode and you're shutting off their creative mode, and then that's the problem. So now your imaginative self starts to lose that that that freedom and that and that that that love of life, and you start really getting into the almost the bits and the bites. I can do one, two, three, I can do ABC. Like, no, I want you to see an entire bird and how it flies. So, but I'm starting to realize that, and I want to make sure I nurture the imagined nation as much as I can before I start, you know, layering in some of the analytical stuff. I think that will make a difference. If you really notice some of these we call these whiz kids schools that they have for young adults, they lead with that, the creative side of things, the artistic side of things, and they they they understand that yes, computational and analytical work is very important, but at a certain point in time, we still need to get that creativity going. Otherwise, you start getting into built-in status quo. I need somebody that can think outside the box.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Well, there's there's another side to that though, because like I I have somebody I work with now who's highly creative, but I also can't get them to follow any directions. They're not coachable. It's it's like they've got ADHD so bad they can't focus on anything. Everything's a great idea, they got a new idea every day. I tell them, no, I don't we don't want to do that, we want to do this, but I can't get them to stay focused. And and the problem I have with them is like they're not coachable. Like they have all these ideas and they're very creative, but I can't get them to focus that energy where we need it. And and there's no coach, they're completely uncoachable. And and so that's the problem. It's like it's like we want all the creativity, but at some point in time, we also need employees to do what we want them to do.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

Yeah, you're right. That's that you have to brain both for those sides of your brain, left brain, light, right? But it has to be a harmony with it, and it has to be some accountability, responsibility. You know, it's not all playtime and imaginary work, right? Yeah, but you bring it all together so that you're a fully functional uh operating adult, right? But you're operating at a higher level, like you can see things that you normally would not be able to see. That's the thing that I think an AI is bringing to the table right now. It's like, oh, I I can I did not really see that correlation or some of the things that were caused causation. If you start bringing all the variables to bear, and then you could see a different path forward. Again, I think your different path forward came in like, look, if I'm gonna enter into software engineering space and and become a player in this market, I've got a differentiation, I've got to then do something different from where my competitors are doing. But it's gotta it's gotta be relevant, can't be too outside the box, but gotta be just enough to make people believe in what I'm doing, and then of course, you have to then be able to produce that outcome.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

So, some something else to go along with what you just mentioned there about people being creative and coachable and and all this stuff. Part of this only comes with experience and and some age, because you you have to have enough experience from all this stuff to build up being very pragmatic. Right? Because you're young, everything sounds like a great idea, you're very creative. I should do this thing, I should do, I could chase all the things, but it only comes with some wisdom that you become

Creativity Coaching And Knowing Good

SPEAKER_01 29:55

more pragmatic. You're like, well, that sounds great, but I actually know how you know to take that idea and do something with it, right? You know what I mean? Like there's a certain amount of pragmatic, pragmatic part of it too, that only comes with a lot of wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

You gotta work with everybody, that's why you have to have a team. Somebody's been down that road. Uh, and if you see things more, it's it's it's a realism that takes place, and at the same time, you've got to be able to see creativity. Because if you already know the outcome, that's where I call go back to your physics, right? Applied knowledge. You pretty much know if the variables are the same, if the variables are the same, this is a is a pretty guaranteed uh uh result. Yeah, variables are the same. If the variables are not the same, and we don't really exactly know what the result is going to be, and then we have to use our probabilistic or predictive, like, well, perhaps this might uh occur, but then you get back. See, this is the thing with business, everything you do with business has a financial risk uh uh uh attributed to that. This is what you see where businesses uh either grow or fail when they can try to get to that next level on the run. I want to go from six figures to seven figures. Well, you got to take a calculated risk uh uh around that, and but it has to be agreed upon and accountable. We're seeing right now companies that were in retail tell me they didn't get upset when Amazon and things like that came on the scene and like, look, you can do this through a digital um marketplace and get it a lot faster. People don't have to drive when I first came out. Oh, people still like to drive, they like the human component, they like seeing somebody, oh yeah. Yeah, sometimes, but not all the time, obviously not, right? Right? So we can't take everything for granted. Just because something was the way it was before doesn't mean it's gonna be that way tomorrow. But going back to what you're saying, and I'm gonna leave us with this. This is my last question I want to ask of you because I think it's important. Here's a question what what piece of popular advice about leadership and ownership that leaders and this is the this is the crutch that leaders love to hear, they love to hear this, but that actually makes things worse when applied in the real world. And I want you to think about that friction that you talked about in business.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Well, I think it comes back to ownership, right? And as leaders, it's really difficult to give up ownership and ownership and delegate to other people, right? Like we so many of us sort of find our place being the bottleneck or the hero of everything. And the only way to really um to scale a business is to learn to delegate and trust other people. And I know lots of people, I've a friend right now, she's got a company with like 70, 80 employees, great business, but she will not hire people, trust them, delegate, get out of the way. And it ultimately comes down to to hiring the right people. Now, you know, you mentioned like maybe what advice is bad advice. Uh, and and that's not that's not advice that's bad advice. I think that that is some of the most critical advice. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Well, I tell you, Matt, you've given us, I think, some really good information uh that we can really sit back and think about these things. I think ultimately our world is changing, and the thing the skill set required to do job work and to run a business and scale a business is changing. And we have to apply some some more grit to the situation and and do some more due diligence and find out because now we've got information at our fingertips. But can we ask the right questions? Can we ask the right questions to get better results? And then can we take ownership?

Delegation What You Must Own

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Because I still think, like you said, that that cooler talk around you know the business itself, and that question of why are we doing this this way? And if it's not fully vetted, it's not fully uh acknowledged, and and and there's not buy-in from the entire, you know, the the organization, the message gets lost and the value goes down the tube, and then you find yourself, whoa, you know, I've got to make changes because again, money is like water, it starts to drain out. Now, how do you how do you get that back in?

SPEAKER_01 34:31

It's all about ownership and you gotta you gotta build own scale. So, and I I think it's also as leader, it's it's focusing on what you do best, right? And then hiring other people to trust and delegate the other stuff too. It's like I we talked earlier about my LinkedIn stuff. I do all of it myself. I you know, I I've played with having social media people help me, and it's never worked out really good, never has the same result as me. So it's like you gotta but you gotta focus on what really matters to your business, right? And so if LinkedIn really matters to our business, I can't outsource that to somebody else.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

So I like you gotta know what you own, what you do best, and you're the expert at. And true, no one knows exactly how you think where you provide the most value. Exactly. I love that. Where you provide the most value. We're at the end of our conversation. Uh, I have to ask you this question because you are a fellow podcaster, you're also a lover of LinkedIn. You've been now through this experience of the Follow Brand Podcast of Brant McGall. How'd you feel about this?

SPEAKER_01 35:34

I think it's been great, man. I love being on podcasts, I love talking to other people, love sharing knowledge, you know.

Where To Find Matt

SPEAKER_00 35:41

I like that. And you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna be checking you out on LinkedIn as well because I think I learned a great deal. I think our entire audience can learn a great deal. Let us know exactly how they can contact you, specifically also if they want some software engineering services.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Yeah, so you can follow me on LinkedIn and just look for Matt Watson. You can also go to productdriven.com and learn more about my book and podcast and newsletter and stuff like that. Um, at FullScale, if anybody's looking to hire affordable software engineering talent, that's what we do out of the Philippines. We have over 300 employees in the Philippines doing software engineering for 80 different companies. So um, yeah, you can check us out, fullscale.io.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

I love it, I love it. And I want to encourage you and to our audience to check out all the podcast episodes on Follow Brand. They can do so at five next star s t a r bdm. That's be for brand, d for development informasters.com. I want to thank you again and to a prosperous 2026 for year.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

All right, thank you, sir.

SPEAKER_00 36:40

You're welcome.