What a fractional CTO actually does

Founders usually ask for a fractional CTO when the engineering team has grown past the point where anyone is holding the whole picture. The ask sounds like “we need more senior help”. The real problem is almost always that nobody owns the decisions that span teams.

So the job is narrow on purpose. I take responsibility for a short list: the shape of the architecture, the hiring bar, the on-call story, and the handful of bets that would be expensive to reverse. Everything else stays with the team that is already doing it well.

The measure of the engagement is whether the team still makes good decisions after I stop attending the meeting.