Fractional CTO

I join your leadership team on a part-time basis and take responsibility for technology direction. In practice that means being in the room where decisions get made — leadership meetings, board prep, planning sessions — and being accountable for the technical half of them.

The work divides roughly into three. Direction: what to build, what to buy, what to stop doing, and in what order. People: hiring, mentoring engineering leads, and building the kind of culture where good engineers want to stay. Assurance: making sure the money going into technology is producing something, and saying so plainly when it is not.

What it is not is a contract engineer with a grander title. I am not there to write your features. I am there so the people writing them are pointed at the right problem.

The pattern is fairly consistent. You have engineers but no-one senior enough to set technical direction, and the founder who used to do it no longer has the hours. Or you have a technical founder who would rather be building than managing, and the managing is quietly not happening.

Other common signals: delivery has slowed and nobody can explain why; a board or investor is asking technology questions that get vague answers; you are about to make an expensive, hard-to-reverse decision — a rewrite, a platform migration, a first senior hire — and want someone who has made it before.

It makes less sense if what you actually need is more hands. A fractional CTO will not clear a delivery backlog. If the diagnosis is capacity rather than direction, hire engineers and save your money.

One or two days a week, usually for six months or longer. Technology direction compounds slowly; anything shorter tends to produce a document rather than a change.

I work remotely from Oxfordshire with regular time on site — enough to know how the team actually operates rather than how the process diagram says it does. I sit in your leadership meetings, not adjacent to them, and I am reachable between visits when something needs a decision now.

The first few weeks are mostly listening: to the engineers, to the people who depend on them, and to whoever is unhappy. The honest picture is rarely the one in the status report.

I orient the whole engagement towards making myself unnecessary. Success is your organisation needing me less over time, not more — usually because you have hired the permanent leader I helped you define, and I helped you interview.

A technology strategy that a non-technical board can read and challenge. A roadmap tied to business outcomes rather than to a list of features. Engineering leads who are being developed rather than merely managed. And candid counsel — you are engaging me for an honest view, and the arrangement only works if I can tell you what you would rather not hear.