Fractional CTO & Product Lead

A fractional CTO is a senior technical leader who works with your company part-time, typically one to three days a week, providing the strategy, architecture and technical judgment of a CTO without the full-time hire. For funded startups it fills the gap between "we have engineers" and "someone senior owns the technical direction."

The version I offer goes one step further: I also design and build. Strategy, product design and implementation from the same person.

Market rates for experienced fractional CTOs generally run $150 to $350 per hour, or monthly retainers from roughly $5,000 for advisory-only involvement up to $20,000+ for multiple embedded days per week. A full-time CTO at a funded startup costs $250,000 to $400,000 a year plus meaningful equity, which is the comparison that matters.

My engagements are structured as monthly retainers scoped to days per week, and because I implement as well as advise, the retainer replaces both a strategy consultant and a senior engineer.

Fractional fits when the product and team are small enough that technical leadership is a few days a week of real work: pre-seed through Series A, teams under roughly ten engineers, or any stage where the founders are technical enough to execute but need senior judgment on direction.

A full-time CTO makes sense when the organization itself (hiring, management, board work) becomes the job. A good fractional CTO tells you when you have reached that point, and for the right opportunity I can scale involvement up toward full-time rather than handing off.

I write production code on every engagement. That is the point of the model: most fractional CTOs produce slide decks and architecture diagrams that someone else has to build. I make the architectural decision, implement it, test it, and verify it works, so advice and execution never drift apart.

With AI-assisted development, one senior person who knows how to direct the tooling properly covers ground that used to need a small team, and everything that ships has been reviewed and tested by someone accountable for it.

It collapses the distance between deciding and shipping. I architect the solution by hand, use AI tooling to accelerate implementation, then review, test and verify everything end to end. The judgment stays senior and human; the throughput is what changed.

The practical result for a startup: features that used to need a PM, a designer and two engineers to work through can be designed, built and verified by one person who has done all three jobs. That is the leverage you are hiring.

Web applications first: PHP/Laravel and WordPress-based platforms, JavaScript/TypeScript, Next.js and headless architectures, plus the surrounding product stack of payments, auth, CRM integrations, analytics pipelines and BigQuery. I have led product work across SaaS platforms, fintech, insurance and advertising technology.

If your core product is outside that range (native mobile engineering, embedded, ML research), I am the wrong hire, and I will tell you that in the first call.

With a short technical and product assessment: I review the codebase, the architecture, the roadmap and how the team ships, then deliver a written read on where things stand and what I would do first. It takes one to two weeks and stands on its own even if we stop there.

From there most engagements settle into a weekly cadence of set days, with the mix of strategy, product design and hands-on building weighted to whatever the stage demands.