What is a Fractional CTO?

At the basic level, it's your Chief Technology Officer who works part time. A fractional CTO can serve many roles and functions and here we're going to focus on companies who haven't launched their product yet. Generally, a fractional CTO is doing work for a number of companies and consulting at a similar stage of growth.

Feature Prioritization

When building an MVP, a fractional CTO can help do a ruthless prioritization of product components. What's in and what's out. This is based on the needs of the user, needs of the market, what's valuable to be paid for -- product's department. But it is largely informed by what's feasible and defensible technically. What can we build at a given complexity so we can bring something novel and valuable, but not incredibly costly. Walking this balance is the job of the fractional CTO.

Technical Scoping

Setting expectations for feature delivery is important. Knowing how much development dollar and time cost is key. It lets the CEO and founder make plans for fundraising, marketing outreach, and user research. The fractional CTO has likely seen buildouts of dozens or hundreds of similar projects, so can tap into industry expertise to predict what could go wrong and median outcome expectation.

Roadmap and Business Advising

Knowing how to place features into the gannt chart to maximize impact is difficult. What comes first, and what are the dependencies of each. The fractional CTO knows the needs of the business as well as the details of the MVP buildout. By having a deep understanding of both, tradeoffs can be made. These tradeoffs are often difficult to quantify. Spend $1500 on instagram ads before or after two sprints that will deliver a 15% improvement in ML accuracy? The technical advisor has the ability to make the conversions necessary for these types of abstract questions.

Hiring and Management

Maintaining a dev team and positive working culture for engineers with varied personalities requires senior leadership. The fractional CTO brings this to the engineering org. Hiring, evaluation, promotion, management of delivery, and augmentation of staff with outsourced engineers all fall under his purview. Tradeoffs for speed and quality are baked into engineering culture, and the technical advisor needs to make the right call to move quickly enough. Low quality slows down long term goals, but perfectionism brings short term delivery to a halt. Another difficult balance.

If you're looking for a fractional CTO, or trying to understand if that modality is right for you and your business, send me a message, and we can discuss.

Original article posted at https://mvpengineer.com/what-is-a-fractional-cto