Why Hire a Fractional CTO? (Pt 2)

In the first part of this two part article I described what a fractional CTO is and why you should hire one.?In this second and final part I'll talk about what fractional CTOs actually do and what you should know before hiring them.

What should I know when hiring a Fractional CTO?

The most important thing you need to know is that not all fractional CTOs are made equal.? We all have our different strengths.

Just like ice cream, we come in many flavours.? You have to ask yourself which flavour you want.??

At Atom CTO, we have a network of CTOs and each of them have their own specialities, I’ll name a few:

• Generalist: Someone who has a broad knowledge of tech and may have worked across many industries but never really specialised in a single area
• Technical Specialists: Those that are blockchain fanatics or only do NLP when it comes to AI, these are people that thoroughly love their technical area
• Strategic: Forward thinkers who are great at running operations and working with the business to plan ahead
• Zero to One: People that only want to do the hard stuff at the beginning and get their hands dirty to get a project up and running but once it is live, they want to move onto the next challenge
• IPO Specialists: CTOs that can get you ready for IPO
• Growth Specialists: Those that have great experience in scaling tech teams but don’t really know how to deal with smaller ones

The list goes on, as you can imagine, but the biggest misconception I feel that occurs with CTOs is that people think that they all code.? If you’ve been in the game as long as I have, you may dabble with new tech from time to time but you don’t have the time to code as you spend most of your time in meetings or writing documents.

What do Fractional CTOs do?

We come to the million dollar question because the answer to this is the answer to what value a fractional CTO will bring.

Remember that you are hiring a fractional CTO because you cannot afford to pay full salary for a highly experienced senior tech resource but you need the knowledge that one brings.

Fractional CTOs will do different things depending on what stage and state your business is in.

If you’re looking to bring on someone early on in a start-up, the fractional CTO won’t be the coder (sure you can give a coder the title of a CTO but that doesn’t mean they are fulfilling the role).??

The fractional CTO will help you set the roadmap for tech, help shape operations, be risk focused, be security minded, will help you understand that an app is not a business and that you will need tech in different parts of the organisation in order to go to market effectively and that you will need to tie that tech together so you can have a holistic view of your business.

For scale-ups the fractional CTO will look towards setting the culture for the tech organisation, building the team, spending about 80% of the time on operations and 20% on strategy. The fractional CTO will be there to ensure that you build new tech whilst not losing sight of serving your existing customers.

For SMEs and evolving businesses the fractional will look more towards strategy, how can you use tech to drive business, how can you gain more customers, retain the ones you have and lower the cost of doing business.? Fractional CTOs help with digital transformation, compliance, governance, all of the the unsexy activities you need to do as an established business.

Of course there is more to this but my aim by giving these examples is that a good fractional CTO, someone that is more senior will have been there and done all of these things and they will be bringing their knowledge to bear on your business - albeit for a fraction of their time.?

In Conclusion

The way of work is changing. Tech is getting more expensive. We no longer need to be in the office and you as a business owner don’t need to have a full time CTO if you don’t need one or can’t afford one.

What you cannot afford is to spend time, money and effort on tech with no one to manage it so when you are thinking about your next big tech spend, consider adding a budget line for a good fractional CTO.

If you'd like to learn more about this topic, feel free to reach out to me or contact us via our company page at Atom CTO