Got the idea. Haven't got a CTO
Executive technology leadership without the full-time hire. We set the product strategy, make the architecture calls, build the team, and decide where AI genuinely belongs — at a fraction of what the title costs.
The gap this fills
You have an idea, possibly funding, and no one whose job it is to decide how it gets built. So the decisions get made by whoever is nearest — an agency quoting on a brief you wrote yourself, or a first engineer optimising for the tools they already know.
Both build what you asked for. Neither tells you whether you asked for the right thing. That gap is where most first products lose six months and a chunk of the round.
What we actually do in the seat
Set the product strategy and the roadmap that follows from it. Make the architecture calls that are expensive to reverse. Write the job specs, sit the technical interviews and tell you honestly whether a candidate is senior or just confident.
Then the unglamorous half: reviewing vendor contracts, keeping a build on schedule, and translating technical risk into language a board understands. You get someone accountable for the technology, not another opinion about it.
Where AI belongs, decided once
Almost every founder is now being told they need an AI strategy. Most of what gets proposed is a pilot that demos well and never reaches production, because nobody scoped the evaluation, the cost per transaction, or who owns it when the model changes.
We work out which parts of your business a model genuinely improves, which are better served by software you already have, and what has to be true before any of it is worth building. Sometimes the answer is that this year's AI budget is better spent on the data that would make next year's models useful.
Designed to end
A fractional CTO who becomes permanent has failed at part of the job. We work towards handover from the start: documented decisions, a team that can operate without us, and a full-time hire we help you recruit when the company is ready to carry one.
What's included
- Product strategy
- What to build, in what order, and what to refuse.
- Architecture decisions
- The calls that are cheap now and expensive later.
- Technical hiring
- Job specs, interviews, and an honest read on seniority.
- AI strategy
- Where a model earns its keep, and where it doesn't.
- Vendor oversight
- Holding agencies and contractors to what they quoted.
- Board reporting
- Technical risk in language investors can act on.
Where we've done this
- Government
Adaptive control for a signalised corridor still running fixed timing plans set once a year.
Read the build - Aviation
A marketplace for aircraft parts, replacing the WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets MRO buyers were sourcing from.
Read the build - Fintech
A payments product that needed to clear compliance before it could clear a transaction.
Read the build
Questions we get asked
An experienced technology executive working with you part-time — typically a few days a month — with real authority over technical decisions rather than an advisory role. You get the judgement of someone who has shipped before, without a six-figure salary and equity grant before you have a product.
It solves the same problem, and usually faster. A technical co-founder is a years-long search that ends in a significant equity split. A fractional CTO gives you the technical judgement now, and helps you hire the permanent person later — by which point you'll know what you actually need, which is rarely what you'd have guessed at the start.
Usually between two and six days a month, set at the start and reviewed each quarter. Early-stage work is heavier at the front — strategy, architecture and the first hires — then settles once the team is running.
In the fractional CTO engagement, not routinely — the value is in the decisions, and a CTO who disappears into a feature branch isn't doing the job. If you also want us building, that's the platform build service, and plenty of founders take both.
We help you hire them, brief them, and step back. Everything is documented as we go precisely so that handover is a fortnight rather than a crisis. Ending the engagement well is part of what you're paying for.
An agency executes a brief. A fractional CTO writes the brief, decides whether the agency is the right answer at all, and is accountable for the outcome rather than the deliverable. We do both, which means we'll also tell you when a build isn't what you need yet.