Fractional CTO

What This Actually Means

The term "fractional CTO" gets thrown around a lot, and it means different things depending on who's selling it. Some use it to describe a monthly advisory call. Others mean a part-time executive who sits on your board but never touches the codebase.

When I work as a fractional CTO, I'm embedded in your business. I attend your standups, review your pull requests, talk to your developers, and sit in the meetings where technical decisions are made. I also write code. The difference between this and a senior contractor is that I'm thinking about where your technology needs to be in twelve months, not just what's on the sprint board this week. The difference between this and a full-time CTO is that you're not paying for five days a week when you might only need two or three.

When You Need One

There are a few situations where a fractional CTO makes sense, and they tend to follow a pattern. The business has grown past the point where the founder can make all the technical decisions, but it hasn't grown enough to justify a full-time CTO on the payroll. Or perhaps the CTO has left and the team needs senior technical direction while you work out the permanent hire. Sometimes it's simpler than that - you have a technical team that's delivering, but nobody is looking at the bigger picture. Nobody is asking whether the architecture will hold up when you double your customer base, or whether the tech stack you chose two years ago is still the right one.

I've also worked with companies preparing for investment or acquisition, where having credible technical leadership in place - someone who can answer hard questions about the platform, the team, and the roadmap - makes a material difference to how the business is perceived. I know this because I've been on the other side of it. As CTO of SUMAC, I led the technical side of a successful acquisition, which included presenting the platform's architecture, security posture, and scalability to the acquiring company's due diligence team.

How I Work

I typically work two to three days per week, though this adjusts depending on what's happening. During critical periods - a major release, an architectural migration, a security incident - I'll increase my availability. During quieter stretches, I'll scale back. The engagement is structured around what the business needs, not a rigid contract.

In practice, a typical week might include reviewing the team's architectural decisions, pairing with a developer on a complex feature, preparing a technical roadmap for the board, and having an honest conversation with the founder about what's realistic given the current team and budget. My focus is on making the team more effective and the technology more robust. That means being straightforward about the state of things, understanding the constraints, and working within them to move the business forward.

What You Get

The tangible outputs vary depending on the engagement, but they typically include some combination of the following:

• A clear technical strategy aligned to your business goals, not a wish list of technologies
• Architecture decisions that account for where you are now and where you're heading
• Team mentoring and structure - making sure the right people are doing the right work at the right level (something I've written about in detail)
• Stakeholder communication - translating technical reality into language that founders, investors, and board members can act on
• Hands-on code contribution where it makes sense, particularly on the hardest problems or the foundational patterns that the rest of the team will build on
• Recruitment support - helping you write job specs that attract the right people, and interviewing candidates who can actually do the job

Where I've Done This

At MedAscend, I provided fractional technical leadership to a healthcare and education platform. The founders had a working MVP but needed enterprise-level architecture to pursue institutional clients. I re-architected the platform for multi-tenancy, implemented OAuth2-based SSO and RBAC, designed the API layer, and established the engineering processes that would allow the team to scale. The work directly enabled them to pursue contracts they couldn't previously reach.

Before that, I spent over six years as the full-time CTO of SUMAC Mentoring, a higher education SaaS platform. I built the team, led a complete platform rewrite, containerised the infrastructure, implemented CI/CD pipelines, and guided the company through a successful acquisition. That experience - the full lifecycle from first commit to exit - informs everything I do as a fractional CTO. I've lived the problems that most advisors only read about.

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If your business needs senior technical leadership without the overhead of a full-time hire, I'd be happy to discuss how a fractional CTO engagement could work for you. Get in touch.