Fractional CTO

Need a technical leader who can provide strategic vision and objective analysis?

Ten Mile Square provides expert technical and product leadership through interim roles like Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Head of Product Management for companies that are on a growth trajectory or are looking to overcome financial or market challenges. Our goal is to help our clients build technology products and leverage technology platforms to achieve their business objectives cost-effectively and efficiently. Leveraging our 30+ years of expertise, we help CEOs and leaders make the best technical and product-related choices and provide the necessary leadership and technical skill to ensure that technology platforms are reliable and well received in the marketplace.

What Is a Fractional CTO?

A Fractional CTO is a senior-level technology executive who provides experienced leadership and strategic direction on all things technology to businesses that do not have a full-time CTO. The Fractional CTO role helps to overcome the key challenges facing many businesses today such as product unreliability, scalable architecture, overwhelming technical debt, missing product release deadlines, high costs of product maintenance, and lack of understanding of the security posture.

Fractional CTOs also advise CEOs on better ways to run their businesses from a technical perspective, help to build and grow high-performing teams and work with other senior executives to develop long-term technology strategies that align with business goals. In short, a Fractional CTO is an invaluable asset to any business that wants to stay ahead of the curve on all things technology.

When Is It Time to Hire a Fractional CTO?

As your business grows, you may find that you need more technical expertise than you currently have on the team to lead you to the next growth phase. Or, you may have a great team in place but find that you’re still struggling to meet your growth goals. In situations like these, it may be time to hire a fractional CTO.

A fractional CTO is a highly experienced technical leader who can provide the strategic vision and direction you need to take your business to the next level. They can help you assess your current technology landscape, identify areas where you need to make improvements, and develop a plan for achieving your growth goals. Fractional CTO services can also provide an objective perspective on challenges and opportunities, which can be invaluable for making decisions about investments in new technology.

If you’re not sure whether hiring a fractional CTO is right for your business, consider the risks of not doing so. For example, if you’re losing revenue because of customer complaints or missing out on new revenue opportunities, then hiring a fractional CTO could help you turn things around. Similarly, if there’s a breach of trust or communication between the CEO and technology leadership, hiring a fractional CTO could help repair that relationship.

What Are the Roles of an Interim or Fractional CTO?

We take on all aspects of daily technology and product leadership including:

Goal Setting

Define the core technology goals and align them with overall business goals in the first days of working together including:

Rapid Assessment

Execute intensive analysis of your technology platforms to identify roadblocks to scaling and recommend platform and process changes to improve business and technical operations and product quality including:

Documentation of the current state of your platforms
Prioritizing key technical and product challenges
Defining the target state to remediate challenges and implement modern technology
Evaluation of current team and organization structure
Examination of key technical and product management processes for scalability

Daily Management

Oversee your technology development and product management teams including:

Working with business stakeholders and customers to identify new product needs
Representing the company to industry analysts, customers, and partners
Prioritizing work based on business need, ability to deliver, and cost
Supervising your technology and product teams
Optimizing technical and product management processes
Recruiting new talent, securing outsourced partners, and cycling out underperformers
Ensuring high-quality, on-time delivery of platform functionality
Working with key customers to implement custom capabilities
Evaluating product feature backlog to include customizations for all customers
Managing the technology and product development budget

Technology and Product Direction

Ensure that your products and platforms serve the needs of your customers now and in the future by:

Building and maintaining your company’s technology and product roadmap
Directing R&D efforts that will lead to new commercial products and revenue streams
Managing the product portfolio, so that your company will make effective decisions about future product direction based on budget, resource needs, time, and market constraints

Technology Evaluation and Selection

Make several key tech choices for product development efforts based on the desired business outcome, cost of delivery, skills of the current and desired team, and market expectations. Put in place the structure, do the research, and make fact-based, defensible recommendations on the technologies that suit your needs. Our technology expertise spans the technology lifecycle:

Software development tools (IDEs, project tracking, and requirements management)
Technology frameworks
On-premise infrastructure
Cloud-based services
QA and configuration management
DevOps tools
Ongoing operations management

How do I Transition from an Interim to a Full-time CTO?

Our typical Fractional CTO engagements are 3-6 months. At the start of our work with you, we establish a transition plan for building team capacity and transitioning the CTO to a full-time position. It sets clear expectations for leadership and provides a framework of change management for the product development team and outsourced partners.

Building Team Capability and Maturity

Our approach is to build your internal capability and competency for the technology team. First, we first show you and your team how to execute the plan and daily management, next watch your team and leaders execute while providing coaching, and finally establish a culture of mentorship. Typically after 3 sprints following the new process, we scale back our time and monitor the team as they are fully functioning and able to achieve the technology goals established.

Transition Fractional CTO Role

A large percentage of our clients go on to hire a full-time CTO or VP role so we work directly with you through the hiring and onboarding phases including:

Establishing a profile of functional skills, expertise, and responsibilities for the role
Consulting with hiring managers or recruiters to articulate needs for the role
Screening candidates that apply and providing feedback for selection
Transitioning responsibilities and knowledge to the new hire

HEALTHTECH SECURITY

“We had a great product but had holes in our SaaS architecture and security. Ten Mile Square came in to conduct a technology assessment and quickly laid out a plan, executed the strategy, and provided us the resources we needed. Serving as our fractional CTO, Frank understood our business and growth goals. He provided the foresight of what we needed to meet our company’s technology vision.”
– ADAM GROSS, CEO, RIGHTEYE

Turned Revenue Losses into Multi-million Dollar Gains

Ten Mile Square worked integrally with iJET to transform its travel risk management SaaS platform. Fulfilling the Fractional CTO and other product management roles, we worked alongside the iJET team to realize its platform vision and increase revenue:

Defined technical and product priorities to optimize the entire tech lifecycle
Implemented agile methodology to reduce product development time for new features while building team trust and collaboration
Standardized all products on cloud-based tech stack for lower cost and greater reliability of products and operations
Created continuous delivery processes to streamline new product releases and feature upgrades

Doubled Development Team Velocity

Ten Mile Square initially performed a comprehensive technology assessment for healthtech, Right Eye, that lead to ongoing Fractional CTO support to implement improvements across the board and uplift the entire organization to new capacity and capabilities.

Implemented end-to-end lifecycle processes for product ideation to product delivery
Lead technology improvements to productize data science efforts and new models
Ensured that the voice of the customer was considered in product prioritization and feature definition
Increased predictability, velocity, and throughput of their development team by more than 2x
Established a scalable, repeatable demand management model