October 22, 2026
October 22, 2026
What does a fractional CTO actually do?
A fractional CTO finds what’s slowing a business down and works out how to fix it, with technology or without it. Here’s what the work looks like.
A fractional CTO finds what’s slowing a business down and works out how to fix it, with technology or without it. Here’s what the work looks like.
A fractional CTO finds what’s slowing the business down and fixes it, working a day or two a week. Sometimes the fix is technology. Often it’s a process, a vendor or a missing hire, and the job covers those too.
This is what that looks like in my engagements.
Finding the real problem
Most engagements start with a founder describing a symptom. Staff re-key the same data between systems, a release keeps slipping, or a vendor’s quote looks too high. My first job is tracing that symptom back to its cause, which is often somewhere nobody was looking. A slow team can turn out to be a hiring problem, and an expensive build can turn out to be something a cheap tool already does.
Planning the fix
Once the cause is clear, I work out how to deal with it and in what order. That covers how the systems should fit together, whether to build or buy, which vendors to trust and what it will take to keep things running once they’re live. The trade-offs go in writing, so the founder can see what’s being decided and why.
Hiring the team
A lot of fixes come down to people. I recommend whether a role should be in-house or contracted and what level of experience it needs. Then I write the job descriptions, brief the recruiters and run the technical interviews. Most growing businesses have nobody who can tell a strong senior engineer from a confident one, and a bad senior hire costs far more than the time it takes to get the hire right.
Seeing it through
The plan only matters if it gets carried out, so I stay with it through delivery. I review the architecture as it’s built, check that vendors deliver what they promised, help when something breaks in production and keep security and compliance right along the way. In finance especially, how client data is handled is a legal question as much as a technical one.
Where it stops
A fractional CTO is senior leadership a day or two a week. When a business needs that every day, it’s time to hire full time, and I’ll say so and help find the right person. The other common ending is that the hard problems get solved and the business only needs occasional advice afterwards.
If you’re weighing up whether to bring one in, read how to choose a fractional CTO or see how I work.
A fractional CTO finds what’s slowing the business down and fixes it, working a day or two a week. Sometimes the fix is technology. Often it’s a process, a vendor or a missing hire, and the job covers those too.
This is what that looks like in my engagements.
Finding the real problem
Most engagements start with a founder describing a symptom. Staff re-key the same data between systems, a release keeps slipping, or a vendor’s quote looks too high. My first job is tracing that symptom back to its cause, which is often somewhere nobody was looking. A slow team can turn out to be a hiring problem, and an expensive build can turn out to be something a cheap tool already does.
Planning the fix
Once the cause is clear, I work out how to deal with it and in what order. That covers how the systems should fit together, whether to build or buy, which vendors to trust and what it will take to keep things running once they’re live. The trade-offs go in writing, so the founder can see what’s being decided and why.
Hiring the team
A lot of fixes come down to people. I recommend whether a role should be in-house or contracted and what level of experience it needs. Then I write the job descriptions, brief the recruiters and run the technical interviews. Most growing businesses have nobody who can tell a strong senior engineer from a confident one, and a bad senior hire costs far more than the time it takes to get the hire right.
Seeing it through
The plan only matters if it gets carried out, so I stay with it through delivery. I review the architecture as it’s built, check that vendors deliver what they promised, help when something breaks in production and keep security and compliance right along the way. In finance especially, how client data is handled is a legal question as much as a technical one.
Where it stops
A fractional CTO is senior leadership a day or two a week. When a business needs that every day, it’s time to hire full time, and I’ll say so and help find the right person. The other common ending is that the hard problems get solved and the business only needs occasional advice afterwards.
If you’re weighing up whether to bring one in, read how to choose a fractional CTO or see how I work.
