Engagement
Fractional CTO
What a fractional CTO actually does
The title is used loosely, so here is the concrete version. Across a typical engagement the work falls into five buckets, roughly in this order:
- Assessment. Read the codebase, the last six months of tickets, the incident history and the cloud bill. Then talk to people, to explain what the artefacts already showed.
- Decisions. Build versus buy. Rewrite versus refactor. Which vendor, which platform, whether to take on the compliance regime that opens the enterprise market. Each one written down with its reasoning, so it does not get relitigated every quarter.
- Delivery. Getting something real into a real environment early — week two on platform work. Predictable shipping is a process problem far more often than a talent problem.
- The team. Structure, levelling, hiring loops, and the uncomfortable personnel conversations that a founder has usually been deferring for a year.
- Succession. Recruiting and onboarding your permanent technical leader, which on most engagements is the actual deliverable.
The first thirty days
Week one is almost entirely reading. Repository, commit history, ticket flow, architecture as documented versus architecture as built, the last four postmortems, and the AWS or GCP invoice — which is the single most honest document in most companies, because it describes what the system actually does rather than what anyone believes it does.
Week two is people, and by then the questions are specific: why does this service exist, who decided this, what happened the last time you tried to change it.
By the end of week four you get a written assessment with a ranked list of what to fix, what each fix is worth, and what it will cost. Not a slide deck of observations — a decision document.
Fractional CTO vs the alternatives
| Option | Typical cost | Time to productive | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fractional CTO | $18k–$32k / mo | 1–2 weeks | You need senior judgement now and the decisions are bigger than the team |
| Full-time CTO | $280k–$400k + equity | 4–6 months to hire | The role is permanently full and you can attract the seniority you need |
| VP of Engineering | $220k–$300k | 3–5 months to hire | Strategy is settled and the problem is execution and team scaling |
| Development agency | $40k–$150k / mo | 2–4 weeks | The spec is clear and you need hands, not judgement |
| Interim CTO | Full-time rate | 2–4 weeks | A CTO left abruptly and the seat cannot be empty |
Cost ranges for full-time roles are US market bands for mid-market companies and vary substantially by geography and stage.
When you should not hire a fractional CTO
If your technical strategy is settled and your problem is throughput, hire engineers or an agency. If you can recruit and afford a strong full-time CTO and the role will be full for the next three years, hire one — a fractional executive is more expensive per day and that is the correct trade only when the seat is genuinely part-time. And if what you actually want is someone to validate a decision you have already made, save the money.
Why this practice specifically
I hold an operating CTO seat right now, not only an advisory one — Chairman and CTO at Diagnostic.ly, a multi-tenant diagnostics platform running under HIPAA with HL7 v2 and FHIR R4 interoperability and an AI-first engineering pipeline in production. Before that, a decade running a SOC 2 certified marketing technology practice for enterprise healthcare and financial services clients.
That matters most in regulated industries, where the expensive mistakes are made in the first architecture conversation and are not discoverable until an auditor arrives.
Common questions
How many days a week?
Two to three, on a named and consistent pattern rather than ad-hoc availability. Ad-hoc fractional arrangements fail because nobody can plan around them.
Will you write code?
Yes, where it is the fastest way to resolve a question — a spike, a model, a proof of an architectural claim. I am not a substitute for your engineering team's throughput and you should not buy me as one.
How does it end?
Ideally with your permanent CTO hired, onboarded and holding the decision records. Thirty days' notice on either side, all IP and work product yours, no exit fee.
Do you work outside Texas?
Yes — engagements run remotely across the US with travel as the work requires. Fort Worth and the DFW metro are simply where I am.
Next step
Start with four weeks, not twelve months.
The diagnostic sprint produces the written assessment described above at a fixed fee, with no obligation to continue. It is the honest way to find out whether a longer engagement is worth it to you.