Senior technical judgement on retainer, from someone who has to live with these decisions.
Fractional CTO and technical advisory
Fractional CTO services and technical advisory on a monthly retainer: architecture and delivery reviews, hiring-bar decisions, vendor and stack calls, a standing call every 2 weeks and async access in between. Every decision comes back as a short written recommendation. Starts with a free 20-minute scoping call.
Monthly retainer · Free 20-minute scoping call first
- 10 years building software
- Shipped to 27 markets
- Zalando, previously Shopify
The problem
Your team is making decisions that are expensive to reverse. Nobody in the room has done it before, and every vendor you ask is selling something.
What you get
- A written recommendation on the decision in front of you.
- The trade-offs stated plainly, including the cost of being wrong.
- A review of your architecture, delivery process or hiring bar.
- Someone your team can escalate to without booking a consultancy.
How it runs
- Week 1 I read your context: docs, code, tickets, whatever exists.
- Ongoing A standing call every 2 weeks, plus async access in between.
- Per decision A short written recommendation, in the format of an ADR.
- Quarterly A review of what we decided and what it actually cost.
Why me
- I cut an AdTech provider cost by 32% a year at Zalando.
- I raised ad-generation automation from 15% to 90%, around 200,000 euro a year.
- I have migrated a monolith to event-driven services and lived with the result.
Do not book this if
- You want someone to write the code. This is advisory, not delivery.
- You want a signature on a decision already made. I will disagree in writing.
I would rather turn down the booking than take money for the wrong thing.
What it costs
€2,000
per month, from
Companies get a free 20-minute call to scope the work. Everything after that is paid.
Questions
What is a fractional CTO?
A senior engineering leader who owns a company's technical direction part time, usually 1 or 2 days a week on retainer. For a team of 3 to 30 engineers it buys the decisions a full-time CTO would make, without the full-time salary.
What does a fractional engineering leader do?
Makes the technical decisions a company cannot postpone and has nobody senior to make: architecture, delivery, hiring bar. Part-time, on retainer, with written recommendations rather than slide decks.
What does the retainer include?
A standing call every 2 weeks, async access, and written recommendations on the decisions that come up. Scope is agreed before we start.
Can you do a one-off review instead?
Yes. A single architecture or process review is scoped separately. Ask on the intro call.
Do you sign an NDA?
Yes, standard mutual NDA before I see anything internal.
Fractional CTO and technical advisory
Architecture, hiring and delivery, on retainer.