Fractional CTO: Focused Technical Leverage for SMEs

Role Definition

Bridges strategy, architecture and delivery cadence.

Owns alignment between technical debt paydown and commercial milestones.

Engagement Signals

• Missed release commitments
• Escalating incident noise
• Founders making ad-hoc architecture calls
• Recruiting misfires / churn
• Investors pressing for credible roadmap

Engagement Model

1. 1. 360 technical & delivery diagnostic
2. 2. Prioritised risk & leverage map
3. 3. Architecture guardrails & standards
4. 4. Cadenced roadmap + KPI instrumentation
5. 5. Talent coaching & hiring support
6. 6. Quarterly strategic recalibration

Anti-Patterns

• Treating role as tactical fixer only
• No explicit success metrics
• Lack of founder time allocation
• Over-focusing on tools vs outcomes
• Ignoring team capability uplift

Leadership Impact KPIs

• Deployment frequency
• Change failure rate
• MTTR (mean time to recover)
• Lead time idea→release
• Engineering retention
• Roadmap predictability

Case Snapshot

Scale-up with 5 parallel rewrite threads, slipping deadlines, no error budget.

Imposed architecture runway, instituted error budgets & weekly risk council.

• Deploy frequency 1/w → 5/w
• Incident MTTR 9h → 1.5h
• Velocity predictability +35%
• Reduced rewrite scope 42%

Enablement Assets

• Architecture decision records
• Runbook library
• Metrics dashboard (DORA + business)
• Hiring scorecards
• Incident review template
• Risk register

Before Engaging

• Define sponsorship (founder/CEO)
• List top 5 delivery risks
• Baseline DORA metrics
• Clarify 90-day outcomes
• Allocate weekly sync slot
• Identify internal champions

FAQ