Expertise

Fractional CTO

A senior technical lead, part time, for companies where technology already decides the outcome but does not yet justify a full-time CTO.

There is a size of company where technology is already decisive but nobody's actual job is to decide it. The choices get made by whichever vendor happens to be in the room, or by the one in-house developer, or by management on the strength of a slide deck. Each of those choices, taken alone, looks reasonable. Added up, three years later, they produce a system nobody really controls and that costs more every month than it returns.

A fractional CTO answers that size: the same role, with the same decision-making weight, for two or three days a month or a week depending on the phase. It is not a consultancy that delivers a document and leaves: it is continuous responsibility for the company's technical choices.

What I take on

• Architecture. Which systems to keep, which to replace, how to make them talk. The most expensive decision to get wrong is usually also the one taken fastest.
• Vendor decisions. Reading the specs, holding the technical negotiations, recognising when a quote is buying a problem rather than solving one. Usually the line that pays for itself first.
• The team. Hiring the right developers, training them, giving them a modern way of working with AI. The goal is not that you depend on me: it is that at some point you no longer need me.
• Priority. Deciding what gets done first and, above all, what does not get done. Roadmaps die of too many important things at once.
• Stewardship. Live software needs someone looking at it every week: what broke, what got slower, what nobody uses any more.

How we work together

It almost always starts with a short reading period: two or three weeks in which I look at the systems, talk to the people who actually use them and not only to those who bought them, and give you an honest map of what you have, what it costs you and what is blocking you. From there we decide the rhythm together: some need a day a week on site, others two days a month plus availability on decisions.

The way I work is the one described in the notes: one process at a time. Every engagement starts from a problem somebody in the company actually feels, produces something usable within weeks, and becomes the building block for the next piece. I do not bring the big three-year plan, because I have watched too many big three-year plans end up in a drawer at the first change of priority.

Related reading: Why big digital transformation projects fail in mid-sized companies · A control room for management

When you do not need this

If you already have an in-house CTO who works, you do not need one. If the problem is a single project with a beginning and an end, a project contract makes more sense than a continuous role. And if what you are looking for is someone to approve decisions already taken, I am not the right person: the value of this role lies precisely in being able to say that a road is wrong before it costs.