10 reasons to hire a fractional CTO or CPO?

Yesterday I attended a fractional unconference and even between fractional experts, there were different opinions on the value fractional experts can bring. So why would you hire a fractional CTO [technology] or CPO [product]?

1. No full-time need

The most obvious reason to hire a fCTO or fCPO is because you don’t need a full-time person. If you have a small technical team of less than 10 people, having a full-time CTO might actually bring down the productivity of the team. A manager that is bored, will “create work” that is not always the most valuable. For product management, the case is often even clearer. Very few smaller organisations have such a large team of product managers that they need a full-time CPO.

2. The value of experience

Working on a full-time basis is a binary decision. You either work 100% for a company or 0%. That also means that your financial future depends 100% on this work being stable and paying you in the future. Most startups fail. So if you have experience and a family to feed, you might not want to work full-time for a startup that is loss making. So the people you find that are willing to risk everything on a job which is unstable, might not be the most experienced CT/POs. So if experience is important, and most of the time, the tech foundations and the product for a successful business need to be built early in its lifecycle, then hiring a fractional CT/PO can provide you with that experienced expert just when you need it.

3. You learn more from failure

Most billionaires had important failures before. Very few people do something for the first time and become world-class without failing. A fractional expert is more likely to see failure than a full-time expert. A fractional expert will have more opportunities to try different approaches than a full-time expert. A fractional expert can avoid you having a failure because they have experience making the same mistake before.

4. You cannot afford them otherwise

So if you value experience but cannot afford to pay a top-end salary for a full-time expert, then a fractional expert might be the only affordable option. The fractional expert can charge a high hourly tariff but have 3 to 10 concurrent customers. This is the way for them to earn similar or more than working full-time at a market leading company but only focus on what they are really good at. So you get experience within your budget.

5. Avoid the office politics

Most fractional experts are really good at what they do, but don’t necessarily enjoy the office politics which come with a full-time executive job. By working for multiple customers in a clearly fractional role, they can avoid being drawn into internal power battles. Often office politics happens because another executive is feeling afraid that their job or career is threatened. If there is no threat to other people’s careers, then the fractional expert can work 100% on solving the actual problem.

6. No ah*les, at least unknowingly

A fractional expert, who is an ah*le without the client knowing it, is unlikely going to be very successful. Fractional workers need word of mouth marketing. They cannot afford that their ah*liness spreads faster than their results. Even if there would be a fractional ah*le then there are probably two good reasons. The first is because they are such a great expert in solving such a critical and temporary problem, that bringing a solution makes up for anything else. The second could be, because the CEO values bringing in an ah*le to do the dirty work. What does that tell about the CEO??

7. More time to hire the long-term solution

Hiring the best candidate takes time. The problem might become only worse over time. So having a quick solution is often better. Hiring a full-time junior person might result in more problems being generated. Even if you actually want and need a long-term solution, if your company can defer this moment until it is clearer on what that perfect candidate should look like and more importantly have the funds available to pay them, then using a fractional solution in the meantime makes sense.

8. Failing is a real option

In business most executives look for great investments with no or low risks. However in some circumstances risk is unavoidable. Launching a new product or technology can go easily wrong. Being able to give it a real try for some months as well as having the option to quickly shut it down in case of failure, allows companies to launch higher risk products or technologies.

9. Success is ours. Failure is theirs.

When a fractional expert is successful, then the CEO can claim the success. When something goes wrong, then the CEO can blame the fractional expert and fire them the same day.?

10. The work is more interesting

If you look through the eyes of the fractional expert then you can see why working fractionally is more exciting. A CTO or CPO loves coming up with amazing solutions for difficult problems. Most successful founders look back at the time when their company was still small and they could really have a big impact and move quickly. Once you have thousands of employees, the percentage of time you can dedicate as an executive to the thing you were hired to do only becomes a fraction of your day job. Steering committees. People's problems. Corporate overhead. Is “the work” now. Fractional experts prefer to focus the bulk of their time on the product or technology, instead of being called the chief but only being able to very fractionally focus on product or technology.

Conclusion

If you have a complex and urgent problem to solve and need an excellent solution, fractional CTO/CPOs are probably your best, cheapest and fastest option. They probably have seen worse...