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.
- A record of what was decided and why, so the next person does not relitigate it.
- A straight answer on what you can postpone, which is usually most of it.
Formats
- Architecture and system design review
- Delivery process and team structure
- Hiring bar, interview loop and calibration
- Build, buy or vendor decisions
- Legacy migration planning
How it runs
- Week 1 I read your context: docs, code, tickets, whatever exists.
- Week 1 One call with your engineers without their manager in the room. It is where the real constraints come out.
- 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.
- I have run over 100 technical interviews and hired more than 10 engineers, so the hiring-bar conversation is not theory.
- I ship software to 27 markets, which is where most architecture advice meets reality.
Seven products I built end to end, with screenshots and measured numbers, are on the portfolio.
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.
- You want a slide deck for the board. The output here is one page an engineer can act on.
- You need someone on site full time. This is a retainer, not a hire.
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.
How is this different from hiring a consultancy?
A consultancy sells a project and leaves a document. A fractional CTO is one named person who is still there next quarter when the decision turns out to be wrong, and who says no in writing before it does. You also talk to the person doing the thinking rather than to whoever was on the bench.
How much of your week does this take?
Enough to answer the decisions as they arrive, not enough to become a bottleneck. In practice that is a standing call every 2 weeks, async access in between, and deeper weeks when something large is being decided. Scope is agreed before we start and revisited each quarter.
Can you help us hire our first engineering lead?
Yes. That is one of the decisions this exists for: what the role should actually own, what the bar is, how the loop should run, and how to tell a strong candidate from a confident one. I have run over 100 loops and sat in the debriefs.
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.