Jeff Zigman, “The Business Engineer”

Partner Rally

THE AUTOMATED HIRING FUNNEL

Get an Army of 1099 commission-only salespeople in weeks with a software to manage them effortlessly.

Of fill any other role in weeks (used with sales, senior developers, markets, attorneys, trucker drivers, even CEO's).

The Automated Hiring System filters out 95% of candidates automatically for you, without reading a single resume, so you can spend your time meeting with the small minority who may be a fit for your needs.

There's a $3,000 setup cost (refunded in full if it doesn't get you results) in which we roll up our sleeves, figure out what you need, and customize every aspect of the "funnel" to your needs, which includes:

1) Posting to get attention
2) Implementing automated systems to track and respond to applicants in a personalized way, despite no API offered by Indeed
3) Adding auto-cancellation criteria to further filter down the end people you meet with

So you end up with ~5% of people appearing in your calendar, with everything you need to know about them in front of you.

This is the result of 6 months of experimentation with Indeed.com that would otherwise cost a company paying a Hiring Manager, CTO, and Automation Engineer for 6 months of experimentation and optimization.

You get it for $3,000 with a refund if it doesn't work for you (it has worked 100% of the time, more than 40 times so far, over a 2 year period).

See more here:
https://partnerrally.com/hiring_automation
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PARTNER RALLY

Once you have the people, you can use Partner Rally to take over from there.

Partner Rally automates everything you need to scale a team effortlessly.

1) Onboarding
- Checklists, with tracking and notifications to admins
- FAQs
2) Training
- Training material, including videos
3) Commission tracking for salespeople
4) Automated commission payouts for salespeople
5) Regular communication updates from your 1099's
6) Leaderboard for gamified competition

See more here:
https://partnerrally.com/

Chief Technology Officer

TRUEclaims

TRUEclaims.io has 4 software offerings for the automotive space, related to vehicle damage claims.

1) IF YOU'RE A VEHICLE OWNER WHO RECENTLY HAD A TOTAL LOSS AND YOU WANT TO GET A FAIR MARKET VALUE OF YOUR VEHICLE

Get your Fair Market Value in 1 minute here:
https://trueclaims.io/public_fmv?a=1701124930633x196506364394955400

2) IF YOU'RE A PERSONAL INJURY ATTORNEY HELPING YOUR CLIENT WITH A DIMINISHED VALUE CLAIM

Sign up here and you can generate Diminished Value Reports in ~2 minutes, equivalent to 1.5-3 hours of skilled work
https://trueclaims.io/

3) IF YOU'RE A PUBLIC ADJUSTER WHO WANTS TO HANDLE 50x THE NUMBER OF MONTHLY TOTAL LOSS AND/OR DIMINISHED VALUE CLAIMS

Sign up here:
https://trueclaims.io/appraisers

4) IF YOU'RE A COLLISION CENTER OR BODY SHOP WHO WANTS TO MONETIZE EACH CUSTOMER

See how you can monetize off every total loss and a bunch of the damaged vehicles you see here:
https://trueclaims.io/body_shops

The Enterprise MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

The Enterprise MVP brings lightning fast software development into the Enterprise space.

All results-oriented to completely re-risk every project for the enterprise.

Every implementation follows very quickly goes through the following steps in quick succession achieving functional deliverables in weeks.

1) Requirements Gathering
2) Specifications (Use Cases, UI, UX)
3)System Design
a. Database Design
b. Programming Logic
4) Frontend and Backend Development
5) Testing /Quality Assurance
6) User Acceptance Testing and user rollout
7) Feedback and iteration
8) Adjustments based on user feedback

With ongoing Project Management and CTO orientation.

See more here:
https://enterprisemvp.carrd.co/

The 2 Week MVP

I have built 12 Minimum Viable Products in anywhere between 3 days and 3 weeks.

I'm always in search of other Niche Industry problems that software can be used to solve and am happy to connect with anyone that wants to partner to get the right tech solution built quickly.

I'm not looking for Unicorn $1B startup ideas.

I'd prefer a Niche Industry of business customers where we get 100 paying customers at $1,000-$5,000 /month in recurring revenue.

Watch examples below to see the scope so you understand these are not small softwares built.

I've been a Business Analyst 12 years, having gathered 10,000's of Software Product Requirements as a startup founder.

I've been a Chief Product Officer and CTO for 10 years, founding and building from scratch.

To date, I've designed, led, built, and optimized more than 300 SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) modules across many products.

Here are a few of the MVPs (and beyond MVP that I've built):

Trucker Matcher (~1.5 weeks to MVP)
Partner Rally (~2 weeks to MVP)
Lead Bridge (~5 days to MVP)
Easy Work Orders (~3 days to MVP)
Real Estate Showcase (~2 weeks to MVP)
Community Helper (~4 days to MVP)
COVID-19 Marketplace (~3 weeks to MVP)
Commercial Real Estate CRM (~2 weeks to MVP)
U10K - Uber For Freight (~3 weeks to MVP)

If you have a strong network with many industry B2B connections where you see a need that software can fill, reach out, let's chat, and see if there's an opportunity.

Chief Product Officer / Chief Technology Officer

Consultant

I do consulting and direct execution for VC funded startups and already-profitable businesses looking to scale.

SOME CLIENTS

VC Funded Startup
- Hired me initially for No-Code automation
- Turned into heavy focus on Requirements Gathering for upcoming feature development
- Fixed up their confusing User Experience

Medical Counselling Practice
- I was brought in by a fellow Fractional CTO due to my expertise in Requirements Gathering
- The mandate is requirements gathering, specifications (a software blueprint), followed by software selection and integrations

Security Company
- The company is looking for salespeople
- I built an automated inbound hiring system, leveraging Indeed
- It filters out 90% of candidates that aren't a fit and schedules the viable ones with him

Fractional CTO / Business Analyst / Business Automation Specialist

Active Shooter Preparedness Online Skill Builder

The only immersive online Active Shooter Prepardness Training made for Enterprise scale rollouts and schools alike.

Customizable to the floor plans, shelter options, rally points, and unique instructions of every unique location.

Interactive, gamified, and trackable by management.

Requires no scheduling, no coordination, and can be rolled out to 10,000 people in days.

Created in conjunction with Alex Killie (former Department of Homeland Security ~5,000 people trained).

Video Testimonial by Joy McIntosh, Assistant Head of School (watch below)
"I would purchase SKILL BUILDER['s Active Shooter training] again without any hesitation.

I really found that this course… really made you THINK… I’ve been in other courses where it’s in person… and the time to really think ‘what would I personally do’ really isn’t possible when you’re all together in one space… because you’re not even in your own space… [this really makes it] what’s true FOR YOU…

A lot of the same messaging was included in the in-person trainings [we’ve done], however… this course makes you think about your specific situation… it’s much more PERSONAL and that’s what I’d say is the biggest difference…

Jeff is fantastic! You send him an email, you get an answer! And if he doesn’t have the answer, he says ‘hang on, I’ll get the answer’… It’s been amazing… the turnaround with any question has been nearly instantaneous, if not right then within that minute, then it’s as soon as he can possibly get the answer to the question.

it was like a One-Stop-Shop, which was really excellent… 

I actually put all of our policies and procedures into the course, so as they were going through the overall course, so they could see as they were going through the course that Yes, we have these in place and here they are in writing… it was Incredible… it made it really useful to our particular school… and it was EASY… it was easy to use, it was easy to fill in… it was seamless… it was… it was excellent."

CEO, Founder

SKILL BUILDER

SKILL BUILDER is all about remote learning and employee training.
---
ACTIVE SHOOTER PREPARATION TRAINING

James Marr, Retired Law Enforcement, High-End Security Professional, Asset Protection, Executive Protection
"the way you have put this training together, I’ve never seen anything like it… it’s a paradigm shift in learning which I’ve never seen before… this is interactive, it tests one’s ability to retain, first understand and then retain… it makes the student think while they have a comfortable safe environment to do so… nothing is guaranteed in an active shooter situation… but if you take this course, you should be able to have some type of fundamental preparation, should an incident occur… as far as a 1-on-1, I believe this is the best you can do"

Burke Slater, 20 Years in Medical Device Big Pharma Sales & Management
"my overall opinion of this training is it’s fantastic, it’s needed… I think everyone is better for having gone through it… I think it’s a fabulous way to train a lot of people at once in an economic fashion… it definitely takes you down the path and keeps you on path and guides you through the whole process from A-Z… Skill Builder takes it to another level… everyone is being coached on the same exact strategies… I couldn’t imagine any other way you could feasibly roll this out to a large number of people… with in-person, the cost would be through the roof…this training is applicable to everyone… if you have 10 people or 100,000, this should be seriously looked at as a way of keeping your people safe… this is invaluable, you can’t put a price on it"
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Other Training Courses Created:
- Applying the ASAM Criteria (For Mental Health and Addition Therapists)
- The Personal Contact Phase of Impaired Driving Investigations (For Police Officers)
- Turning Startup Ideas Into Features, Use Cases, and Mockups So Developers Can Understand (For Startup Founders)
- and many more

See video testimonials below.

Founder, CEO

Montreal Mini-Storage Group

I spearheaded all technical challenges for Montreal Mini Storage, Quebec's largest provider of self-storage with roughly 7,000 units and 40 employees.

Overall Mandate: Remove technical obstacles and automate as many manual processes as possible to scale. Initially 3 month trial contract, then renewed monthly by CEO (detailed video testimonial below).

To quote Simon, the CEO, 
"It is worth the investment, and then some, to work with someone like Jeff. You really don't realize the amount of money you DON'T make, especially when you don't have the right solutions involved, you don't realize how much of your own time you're wasting, and only after I started working with Jeff did I see the value that was freed up, not just for myself, but the value to not have people working with frustrating technologies that didn't quite fit perfectly. I'm very very pleased with the decision and I would tell my young self that that's one of those things that's certainly worth it... I've always known that when I wanted to make up a good contract I should hire a lawyer... this is something that's no different."

Mandates completed (a few of the 15+), by order of value to the business:
- $25,000+ yearly in perpetuity: Designed, led, developed a custom storage booking system integrated to their existing backend system -> Removing dependency on expensive vendors ($25,000+ yearly in perpetuity)
- $100,000+ & 12+ months: From 3 days of business requirements analysis, I determined that the 6 previous months of development (before I joined) was a waste and avoided the next year of development-> I course-corrected.
- $24,000: Turned a website quoted at $25,000 by a vendor, into a <$1,000 implementation -> Analyzed, removed redundancies, extracted essentials, found a freelancer.
- Automated Google Reviews: Converted a manual review collection for storage locations, into an automated daily running system with no human error (started getting ~50+ Google Reviews /month - Completed within 1 week)

Technology Consultant and Business Analyst

ORGIT

ORGIT makes Transport Management Systems and Warehouse Management Systems.

I am coordinating all involved business and technical parties, including an off-shore development team, to design, direct, and build out the above TMS and WMS systems.

*Company closed down due to COVID19

Director Of Software Development

Automation Integrators

We help people and businesses that are highly focused on sales (emphasis on real estate) to maximize their revenue by closing more deals through the incorporation of advanced software automation into every facet of their business, enabling each person to achieve what it would otherwise take 3-5 people to achieve, without working more, and with no learning curve.

Some of our automations are designed for helping a brokerage/agency as a whole, keeping all sales people "on track" and improving global performance, while others are designed to maximize what each person is able to accomplish by automating certain time consuming and repetitive parts that most people find tedious and demotivating to do.

Here are some of our ever-growing list of automations (if you would like to know more about specific ones, just ask):

GLOBAL PERFORMANCE
- The Automated Personal Assistant For Every Agent
- The “Lazy Agent” Lead Reassign
- The Auto-Reassign of Extra Leads
- Auto-Pull New Email Leads Into CRM

INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE
- The Delayed Email Auto-Reply
- The Bad Lead Weed-Out Form
- The Automated Text Message Follow-up Grind

If you have a specific problem you would like us to try to solve through an automated system, let us know and we'll see what we can come up with.

Automation Integration Specialist

I love solving difficult business problems with software.

Want to get my help 1-on-1 by text or video or see more about me?
https://mvpexpert.carrd.co/

Here are some of the 15 complex problems I've solved and I'm always looking for other lucrative ones worth solving.

Each with a 👇 can be seen in more detail in my "Experiences" below.

1) 👇 The Automated Hiring Funnel helps you filter out 95% of candidates who are a waste of your time, so you can focus on the 5% that are viable potentials.

It piggybacks off Indeed.com and has been used to find viable candidates in many roles within a 2 week period. See below for more.

2) 👇 TRUEclaims is a software for Attorneys, Auto Appraisers, Body Shops, and Towing Companies, that generates Diminished Value Reports and Fair Market Value Reports for damaged/totaled vehicles in 1-5 minutes, equivalent to 2-4 hours of manual skilled labor.

I built it with the consulting help of an Auto Adjuster who has assessed over 20,000 vehicles, who spent 15 years trying to automate the process, unsuccessfully. He went through 19 companies, all of which said it was impossible, one of which wanted to charge him $1M to attempt to build it with no timeline provided. I built a working version in less than 1.5 months.

3) I created an Amazon buying and selling software in 2 weeks, that worked, that a company tried to build, unsuccessfully, for $500,000.

4) I created a matching system software to help fight antisemitism, connecting victims to attorneys willing to help pro-bono. This system would have cost $80,000-$100,000 to build. I built it in 1.5 weeks. (this one I did pro-bono)

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THE CRITERIA I LOOK FOR IN SOFTWARE TO BUILD

a. A problem that is non-simple with complex requirements that most people would get wrong
b. Where a solution will produce massive value (increased profits, decreased losses, valuable customer insights, huge time saved)
c. Where a single customer would pay at least $1,000 /month for a solution

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I've spent a decade trying to find a strong Business Development partner.

If you're a natural salesperson, unrelenting, self-motivated, I'd like to meet you. We'll make a lot of money together.
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MY BACKGROUND

- 13 years Business Analyst
- 11 years CTO
- 13 years User Experience optimization (when I build software, it rarely requires any training with customers)
- 17 years Software Testing
- 10 years Database Design & Logic and System Design
- 13 years Project Management
- 11 years Selling
- 11 years creating business relationships

I've also been doing martial arts for 20 years.

Jeff Zigman, “The Business CTO”

Matt Watson

Full Scale

Helping companies scale with affordable talent in the Philippines. Provided $50M worth of dev services to over 200 clients since 2018.

Our 300+ employees are helping dozens of companies build their software quickly and affordably.

* Philippines based, English fluency is superb!
* Staff augmentation model, our team works directly for you!
* Focused on senior level developers
* No middle man project managers in the way

Founder & CEO

Product Driven

A must read guide for anyone working in tech or startups on how to build teams that think about customers and take ownership of their work.

Author

Full Scale Ventures

Venture Studio creating new SaaS companies

Chief Executive Officer

Startup Hustle

Podcast about entrepreneurship with over 6 million downloads! We interview entrepreneurs and others related to the startup ecosystem.

Podcast Host

At Capacity

The only smart ads platform for home services. We turn search ads off when our customers have full schedules or are "At Capacity". We turn their ads on and advertise special offers when they need more customers.

Founder, CEO, CTO

CAMP Digital

Leading the development and product teams to help take CAMP to the next level. CAMP Digital is the industry leader in digital marketing for home services. We have the unique ability to dynamically change ad campaigns based on the capacity of our customers.

Stackify

Stackify (sold 2021 to Netreo, then to BMC in 2024) provides the ultimate combination of tools for developers to monitor and troubleshoot their applications. We combine application performance monitoring (APM) with server monitoring, app metrics, advanced error tracking, and log management in a single, easy to use platform for developers.

VinSolutions

One of two original founders of the company in 2003. Started the company with the simple goal of helping car dealers upload car photos to the internet and syndicate them to internet classified websites. Over many years the product rapidly expanded in to an inventory management, website, CRM, and internet marketing product. VinSolutions became the market leading CRM solutions for car dealers with thousands of customers. I provided most of the product vision for the entire suite of products and as CTO was in charge of all product and software development.

Founder, Chief Technology Officer

Physicians Reference Laboratory

Designed and developed laboratory information systems

Senior Architect & Lead Developer

Ticket Solutions

Designed and developed software for tracking and retailing tickets

Senior Application Developer

Serial Entrepreneur, Startup CTO, Podcaster, Blogger @ VisionaryCTO.com

I’ve spent over 20 years as a founder and CTO, starting in 2003 when I co-founded one of the earliest SaaS companies. We bootstrapped VinSolutions to $35M ARR and sold it for $150M in 2011.

Since then, I’ve built and scaled multiple companies. I’ve led engineering teams through every phase of growth. I’ve also learned firsthand what breaks when leadership, product, and engineering aren’t aligned.

In 2018, I started Full Scale. It began as a way to help myself scale faster with top-tier engineering talent in the Philippines. Today, Full Scale has over 300 developers supporting fast-growing tech companies that need to move efficiently and with clarity.

I recently launched Full Scale Ventures, a venture studio focused on solving real problems for startup founders and engineering leaders. Our first product is EngagePath, a tool designed to help thought leaders identify warm leaders from their followers.

Most recently, I wrote Product Driven, a book for engineering leaders who want to stop playing whack-a-mole with tickets and start building real product momentum. The book is about aligning culture, leadership, and customer focus. Product thinking isn’t just for product managers anymore.

I also host a podcast and write a weekly newsletter focused on the gap between business and engineering and how to close it.

Read the book and subscribe here: https://productdriven.com/connect

Learn more about Full Scale: https://fullscale.io

We started Full Scale to do software development the right way from the Philippines. Our 300+ employees are helping dozens of companies build their software quickly and affordably.

* Philippines based, English fluency is superb!
* Staff augmentation model, our team works directly for you!
* Focused on senior level developers
* No middle man project managers in the way

AI has created a new kind of engineering paradox.

Some less-experienced engineers have mastered AI tools and can “vibe code” their way to fast results. On the surface, it looks like the productivity every company wants.

Meanwhile, some senior engineers have not fully embraced these tools yet, even though they could benefit the most.

But here is the catch:

The people vibe-coding their way through tasks are also the ones most likely to ship code they do not fully understand. And when that code breaks in production, they are stuck.

That is the paradox:
AI makes it easy to write code fast, but even easier to get in trouble if you do not understand it.

It is just like aviation.
Pilots rely heavily on autopilot, but they still train for years because when the system fails, real skill matters.

A lot of people who vibe-code into engineering roles got into tech for the paycheck, not the craft. And when you treat engineering as a shortcut rather than a discipline, AI becomes a crutch instead of a multiplier.

Personally, I want engineers at heart flying my plane and shipping our software.

5x Founder & CTO | Author of Product Driven | Bootstrapped to 9-Figure SaaS Exit | CEO of Full Scale | Teaching Product Thinking to Engineering Leaders

You hire smart engineers
You tell them to think like product leaders
Then you get frustrated when they challenge bad ideas, skip pointless meetings, or ask “why” too often

But that’s the whole point.

Real product engineers aren’t quiet.
They don’t just code what’s handed to them.
They think deeply about what they're building—and why it matters.

And if your culture isn’t ready for that, you don’t want product thinkers.
You want quiet executors who won’t rock the boat.

The fix?
Start leading like you actually want the people you hired.

✅ Give context, not control
✅ Share problems, not tasks
✅ Invite pushback, not silence
✅ Reward outcomes, not effort

If you want engineers who think like owners, you have to create a culture that treats them like owners.

Anything less is just lip service.

fullscale-io

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Talks about #startups, #entrepreneurship, and #softwaredevelopment

I wrote a SQL UPDATE with no WHERE clause in the first week of my first job.
I was terrified and sure I was about to be fired.

How my manager handled it shaped how I later became a manager.

First, he reassured me that we had a backup and someone was already fixing the issue.
Then he stayed completely calm and told me something I didn’t expect to hear at nineteen.
We all learn from our mistakes.

It sounds simple.
It sounds obvious.
But when you think you’re about to get walked out and end up back at Walmart, it hits differently.

He led with empathy and understanding.
He turned it into a teachable moment.

That’s what the best leaders do.

I learned my most important leadership lesson in that first week.
We all make mistakes. The key is learning from them.

People ask me how I raised millions of dollars for my startup.

We had a $150M exit and people are curious how we did it.

We tied up our bootstraps and chased customers, not investors.

We did not raise anything.
Nothing.

We gave $0 of that $150M to any institutional investors.

Bootstrapping is the default path for most startups.
It just does not get the press or the glamour.

Today it is even more possible.
AI makes it incredibly fast to build a product.
Global talent makes it affordable to scale.

It has never been a better time to bootstrap a startup.

Vibe coding works just well enough to fool you.

You give it a prompt.
It builds a decent app.
The UI looks fine. The code runs.
Everything seems okay… until it isn’t.

There’s always something weird—logic errors, data leaks, missing validations.

If you’re a senior dev, you’ll catch it.
You’ve seen enough code to know what “wrong” smells like.
You know when to override the AI and when to trust it.

But if you’re newer?
You assume it’s right—because it runs.

That’s where things get dangerous.

AI is changing the way we build. No question.
But too many companies are cutting junior engineers under the assumption that AI will replace them.

It won’t.

What AI lacks is judgment.
Pattern recognition.
An understanding of what good actually looks like.

And the more we treat AI as a shortcut instead of a collaborator, the more tech debt we’re going to rack up.

Mark my words:
The companies skipping junior talent today will be writing six-figure checks to clean up the mess in two years.

2015: Copying code from StackOverflow
2025: Vibe coding with AI

Different decade. Same problem.

The real question isn’t where the code came from.
It’s whether they can explain what it does.

A real software engineer can.
A basic coder can’t.

The average time-to-hire for a senior developer is 90 days.

That’s three months of interviews, background checks, and onboarding… before a single line of code gets written.

So if you start hiring in January, your new devs don’t start shipping until April.

That’s *one quarter of your year gone* before your roadmap even moves.

We see it every year at Full Scale.

Some CTOs start planning in November or December.

Others wait until “after the holidays.”

The difference isn’t subtle.

The early planners are reviewing candidates before Christmas.

Their new developers are sprinting by the first week of January.

By February, they’re shipping features while everyone else is still waiting for résumés.

That’s the real ROI of early capacity planning — you buy time that can’t be recovered later.

I don't understand why anyone would work 9-9-6.

Why not start at 7am? 

And then if you make it 7 days a week, it becomes...

7-7-7

All that hard work would be good luck!!! 

Forget 9-9-6 and go with 7-7-7 to be a guaranteed winner. 🎰

I just vibe-coded myself straight into the exact mess every engineer tries to avoid… but absolutely can’t.

I’ve been building internal tools with Claude Code at breakneck speed.

It’s insane how fast you can move.

But as I keep iterating, tweaking, regenerating, and “just trying one more thing,” the codebase keeps expanding.

And now?

It’s a disaster.

⚡ Disorganized files
⚡ Duplicate logic
⚡ Dead code everywhere
⚡ Functions doing whatever they want
⚡ Full spaghetti-mode

I’m an engineer. I should know better, right?

But when you’re flying, you’re not thinking architecture. You’re just shipping and stacking the mess higher and higher.

I cooked this spaghetti… and now I’m cooked. 🍝🔥

The only real way to avoid this? Clean as you cook.
Otherwise you end up with spaghetti code and no fork big enough to untangle it.

There is only one kind of person who believes Vibe Coding is the future.

It’s the person who hasn’t built an app yet with 10,000 lines of code... and now has to figure out WTF the code actually does.

Last week at a funding conference I kept hearing the same thing.
VCs want seven or eight months of revenue before they even care.

Most founders get stuck right there.
Too early for institutional funding and not enough traction to get it.

I lived that gap.
I worked full-time during the day and built my startup every night and weekend until we had enough revenue to stand on our own.
It took eighteen months before I could quit my job.

And here’s the truth.
We never raised a dollar from VCs.
We didn’t need to because of those eighteen months of grind.

If you’re in that same gap today, keep going.
Traction will open the doors that funding won’t.

The core job of a startup founder isn't the idea or building the product.

The core job of every single startup founder is distribution.

Sales.
Marketing.
Partnerships.
Business development.

Whatever you want to call it.

It's what turns a side hustle and idea into a real business.

It's what turns inventors into entrepreneurs.

Distribution.

Stop building more features. Go sell something.

It's why I write these posts every single day. 😂

You don’t need a developer who moves fast.
You need one who makes the whole team move faster.

That’s the difference no one talks about.

After placing 400+ engineers into real product teams, here’s what I’ve seen:

The real 10x dev doesn’t ship the most code.
They multiply the effectiveness of everyone around them.

They ask questions no one else thought to ask.
They flag risks early.
They help PMs get clearer.
They make designers sharper.
They connect the dots between users and engineers.

They don’t just do the work—they raise the bar.

Yes, technical skill still matters.
But we’ve stopped chasing code ninjas with fancy resumes.

Because the dev who sees the bigger picture?
The one who understands why something matters before building it?

They’re worth 10x more than the one who just cranks out tickets.

And the best part?

Their impact ripples across your whole team.

Hire for that.
Train for that.
Reward that.

Because you can teach syntax.
But you can’t teach curiosity, clarity, or customer obsession.

"Don't hire a software engineer, use AI instead!" is terrible advice.

Non-technical people usually aren’t good at explaining what they really need.

They are experts in their craft. They just want help solving real business problems.

What they actually need is someone who can read between the lines.

Someone who understands users, constraints, architecture, systems, tradeoffs, and risk.

Someone who can turn vague ideas into real products.

Handing them AI and saying “figure it out” is like telling a CEO to replace their CMO or CFO with AI.

Sure, AI can help. Sure, it can generate a prototype.
But expertise still matters. A lot.

A CEO can make a basic financial model in Excel.
A founder can sketch a marketing plan in a Google Doc.

But no one confuses that with the depth of real professionals.

AI is the same.
It’s a tool.

What people actually want is someone with experience that they can collaborate with.

They don’t want more work. They want real help.

Vibe Coding is not low-code. It’s the opposite.

I used to describe vibe coding like low-code.
But that’s completely wrong.

Low-code platforms are point-and-click, drag-and-drop, configuration-based systems.

They force structure.
They limit chaos.
They give you guardrails whether you want them or not.

Vibe coding?

None of that. ‼️

Vibe coding will give you all the spaghetti dumpster fire code you want.

There are no guardrails.

It's not low code. Do not call it that!

It's more like unlimited bad code.

It's amazing for prototypes, but it needs an engineer in the loop to turn it into vibe engineering.

Hiring engineers at the end of 2025 still feels like a logic puzzle.

We put candidates through timed whiteboard tests and Leetcode marathons.
We grade them on how fast they solve problems with clear inputs and perfect answers.

Then we hire them…
And hand them a task full of missing context, shifting requirements, and trade-offs that don’t have a “right” answer.

Engineering in the real world requires navigating messy ambiguity.
What’s unclear?
What’s missing?
What trade-offs are worth it?
Who needs to be looped in?

That’s the actual job.

So stop hiring engineers based on puzzles AI could solve on day one.

Start hiring for the human side of engineering.

Using Claude Code to build software that uses OpenAI is kind of ironic.

Is everyone else doing this too?

People hate to be sold.
People love to go shopping with friends.

I'll never forget that.

Sales is all about creating relationships.

The Code Monkey is extinct.

It was replaced by Claude Code Monkey.
And GPT Code Monkey.
And every other AI tool that can generate working code in minutes.

Everyone now has an army of code monkeys at their disposal.
All available on demand.
All faster than any junior engineer could ever be.

Some days it feels like we are zoologists managing a troop of AI code monkeys. We give them tasks, they produce results, and then we sift through the output to decide what needs to happen next.

And yes, sometimes they throw shit at us.

This shift changes everything about the role of the engineer. If AI can generate the code, the value moves to understanding the problem, clarifying what matters, and choosing the right direction. The hardest part is no longer typing the solution. It is knowing which solution is worth building.

The engineers who thrive will not be the ones who wait for the next Jira ticket. They will be the ones who understand the product, the customer, and the context well enough to guide the work that the AI produces.

The extinction of the Code Monkey is not the end of engineering. It is the beginning of a higher level of engineering.

We are watching evolution happen in real time.

AI can write the lines of code.
It cannot provide the judgment or the vision.

That part is still the human’s job.

Everyone says it’s impossible.
Your recruiter probably told you it’s too late.
Your HR director agreed.

They’re all wrong.

If you need to hire developers quickly for a January 1 start, you can make it happen. 
And I’ll prove it.

Because while they’re prepping job descriptions for Q1…
We’re already onboarding engineers.

Not theoretical hires.
Not "let's circle back in January" conversations.
Real devs.
Writing real code.
For real teams.
Before the holiday cookies go stale.

The longer you wait, the longer your team stays stuck in hiring limbo.
Meanwhile, your competitors are using December to build actual momentum.

Need devs shipping features in January?
Book them now.
We’ve got availability.

taplio

The Battle

Jeff Zigman, “The Business CTO”

Matt Watson

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taplio

The Battle

Jeff Zigman, “The Business CTO”

Matt Watson

Followers

Posts

Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Matt Watson's LinkedIn Performance

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