Owns the roadmap and its trade-offs
Sets the technical roadmap with your leadership team. Every significant call is written as a decision record — context, options, choice, consequences — so the reasoning outlives the meeting.
A senior CTO, two days a week.
An experienced CTO in your leadership meetings, hiring loops, vendor calls, and board prep — until you’re ready to hire a full-time one. Then we help you find them.
What the role covers
The CTO job, minus the full-time salary.
Decisions, hiring, vendor and security calls, and the board. Your engineers keep owning delivery.
Runs hiring loops
Writes the role, designs the loop, sits on the panel, and calibrates the decision. Levels the first engineering team so titles mean something.
ScorecardsLoopsLeveling
Reviews vendors and contracts
Reads the contract before you sign it. Lock-in, data terms, pricing cliffs, and exit clauses — flagged in plain language.
Build vs buyTermsExit
Watches security posture
Access, secrets, backups, and incident response. Sets the baseline and checks it before a customer’s security review does.
AccessBackupsIncidents
Hiring scorecard
Every candidate scored against the same rubric by every interviewer. Debriefs start from evidence, not gut feel.
Board and investor updates
What shipped, what slipped, what it costs, and what we need. Written for non-engineers, sent on a fixed cadence.
Who does what
Leads the decisions. Your team ships the code.
A part-time CTO on the critical path becomes a bottleneck. So the split is explicit. We own decisions, hiring, and the outside world. Your engineers own delivery, with a CTO who reviews and unblocks.
- Fixed days each week, so your team can plan meetings and reviews around them.
- Async between those days: decision reviews, pull request reviews on critical paths, and urgent calls.
- Weekly 1:1s with your engineering leads.
- Monthly written update to founders, and to the board when one meets.
Built to hand over
Ends with the full-time CTO you hire.
A fractional CTO is a bridge, not a destination. When the team and the roadmap call for a full-time leader, we write the role, run the search loop with you, and overlap with your hire until the handover is done.
- Role definition and scorecard written from what the job has become, not a template.
- Interview loop designed and run with your founders; references checked.
- Overlap period with your new CTO: decision log, vendor map, and team context handed over.
- No lock-in. Every document lives in your tools from the first week.
2 days
A week, on fixed days your team can plan around
1 person
Named CTO for the whole engagement — no rotation
Written
Every significant decision logged as a decision record
Monthly
Plain-language update for founders and the board
We got CTO-level decisions without a CTO-level hire. When we were ready for a full-time one, the scorecard was already written.
Questions
What buyers ask us first.
Is two days a week enough?
For an early team, usually yes — most CTO work is decisions, hiring, and unblocking, not hours at a keyboard. If the load outgrows two days, we say so and adjust.
Will the fractional CTO write code?
Spikes, prototypes, and reviews on critical paths. Not features on the delivery path — that would make a part-time person a bottleneck.
How long do engagements last?
Usually until you hire a full-time CTO. We set a review point every quarter to decide whether to continue, change the days, or start the search.
Do you help hire our full-time CTO?
Yes. Role definition, scorecard, interview loop, reference checks, and an overlap period so nothing is lost in the handover.
How is it priced?
A monthly retainer for a fixed number of days, quoted after a call about your stage and team.
Ready when you are
Tell us the decisions piling up.
A 30-minute call. You leave knowing whether a fractional CTO fits your stage — or whether you need a full-time hire now.