"What does a fractional CTO do?"

"A fractional CTO provides senior technical leadership — architecture decisions, team structure, vendor evaluation, AI strategy, and executive translation — on an ongoing part-time basis (typically 10-15 hours/week), costing a fraction of a full-time CTO hire while bringing pattern recognition from multiple simultaneous engagements."

What a Fractional CTO Actually Does (Week by Week)

Most people think a fractional CTO is either a consultant who shows up with a slide deck or a part-time employee who writes code three days a week. It’s neither. A fractional CTO provides the strategic technical leadership that shapes how your company builds, ships, and scales — without the $350K+ fully-loaded cost of a full-time executive.

I know this because I’ve been doing it across 20+ companies since leaving Google Cloud, where I spent eight years working with engineering organizations at Home Depot, Nokia, KeyBank, and Sabre. Here’s what my actual weeks look like.

The First 30 Days: Diagnostic Mode

Every engagement starts the same way, regardless of company size. I’m running a technical diagnostic — not to produce a report, but to understand where the real bottlenecks are versus where the team thinks they are.

At Home Depot, I learned that what leadership assumed was a deployment speed problem was actually a metrics visibility problem. We deployed comprehensive metrics collection and discovered the actual bottlenecks were completely different from what anyone expected. That lesson applies everywhere: data reveals truth, assumptions hide it.

In the first month, I’m typically reviewing architecture, sitting in on sprint ceremonies, talking to every engineer individually, and mapping the gap between the technical roadmap and the business roadmap. By week four, I have a prioritized list of what to fix first — and more importantly, what to leave alone.

A Typical Week in Steady State

Monday might be a board prep session with the CEO, helping translate a platform migration into language investors understand. Tuesday I’m doing an architecture review with the senior engineers, working through whether the system can handle 10x current load. Wednesday I’m evaluating an offshore development team’s output quality — running through their PR history, deployment frequency, and test coverage. Thursday I’m in a hiring debrief, helping the VP of Engineering decide between two senior candidates. Friday I’m documenting an AI integration strategy.

The through-line is decision quality. Every one of these conversations involves a technical decision that will compound for months or years. The value of a fractional CTO isn’t writing code — it’s making sure the decisions being made today don’t become the problems you’re solving next year.

What Changes at Different Scales

For a 10-person startup, I’m often the most senior technical person in the room. The founder needs someone to validate that their prototype architecture can actually scale, that they’re not about to hire the wrong first engineering manager, and that their cloud spend won’t surprise them at 10x users.

For a 50-person company, the problems shift. Now it’s about team structure — should you have platform engineers or let product teams own their infrastructure? It’s about process — how do you maintain code quality when you’re shipping twice as fast as last quarter? It’s about communication — how do you keep the business roadmap and technical roadmap visible to each other?

For a 150-person organization, I’m usually augmenting an existing CTO or VP of Engineering. They have the day-to-day covered but need a strategic partner who’s seen the next stage of growth. They want someone who can back up their recommendations to leadership with external credibility.

The Engagement Model

I typically work with 3-4 companies simultaneously. This isn’t a weakness — it’s the point. Pattern recognition across multiple organizations means I can see when your problem mirrors something I solved at another company last month. The cross-pollination of approaches across industries is something a full-time CTO, no matter how talented, simply can’t provide.

The standard engagement is $10K/month for roughly 10 hours per week, outcome-focused rather than hourly. I’m not tracking time — I’m tracking whether your deployment frequency improved, whether your team structure is unblocking delivery, whether your architecture decisions are holding up under load.

When a Fractional CTO Isn’t the Right Answer

If you need someone writing production code 40 hours a week, you need a senior engineer, not a fractional CTO. If you have 200+ engineers and a well-functioning leadership team, you probably need a specialized consultant for a specific problem, not ongoing fractional leadership. And if you’re pre-revenue with no technical co-founder, you might need a technical co-founder more than a fractional executive.

The sweet spot is companies between $2M and $50M in revenue, with engineering teams of 5-50 people, who have outgrown their current technical leadership capacity but aren’t ready for — or can’t afford — a $350K full-time CTO.