Strategic Fractional CTO Services
High-level technology leadership and expert guidance on a part-time or project basis
Scaling quickly to achieve growth is a substantial undertaking. It can overwhelm IT teams that maintain daily operations well but are not ready to tackle a complex technical project. On the other hand, hiring a full-time CTO for a single project would be overkill.
That’s when you need a fractional CTO. A fractional chief technology officer provides seasoned, strategic leadership and objective analysis exactly when you need it and only for as long as you need it — giving you the flexibility to scale as your business evolves.
What Is a Fractional CTO?
Fractional CTOs are senior-level tech executives who provide experienced leadership and strategic guidance on all things technology to businesses that do not have a full-time CTO. They help 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.
They 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, Fractional CTOs deliver flexible, cost-effective results for startups, mid-sized firms, or non-tech businesses undergoing digital transformation.
When Is It Time to Hire a Fractional CTO?
As your business grows, you may find that you need more technical expertise to reach the next level. Or, you may have a great team in place but find that you’re still struggling to meet your growth goals. That’s when you need more resources.
A fractional CTO is a highly experienced technical leader who can help you assess the current tech 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. If you’re losing revenue because of customer complaints or missing out on new opportunities, this decision could turn things around. Similarly, if there’s a breach of trust or communication between the CEO and technology leadership, hiring someone with experience in talent and transition management could help repair that relationship.
Unlike full-time resources, fractional CTOs scale, allowing you to ramp up or down as circumstances change, which happens often for startups and businesses experiencing rapid growth. They are also a double win for efficient resource allocation; first by ensuring that you get the most value out of your resources and second by being themselves an efficient resource allocation. Finally, fractional CTOs can also potentially improve two lines on your P & L: expenses by reducing overhead costs and revenue by increasing speed to value.
What Are the Roles of Interim or Fractional CTOs?
We take on all aspects of daily tech 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:
- Path to fuel company growth
- Setting targets for controlling costs
- Product roadmap milestones
- Technical debt reduction
- Definition of cybersecurity
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:
- Review 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 (project tracking, requirements management, IDEs)
- 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 tech 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.
Role Transition
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
Case Study: 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
Case Study: Doubled Development Team Velocity
Ten Mile Square initially performed a comprehensive technology assessment for healthtech, Right Eye, that led 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
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