Fractional CTO for Series A and Growth Stage
Scale your product and team with confidence. Strategic technical leadership to manage rapid growth, build engineering culture, and prepare for your next funding round.
What you're facing
- MVP is live, users are growing, but the system is starting to break
- Growing team from 1-3 to 5-10+ developers
- Technical debt accumulating faster than you can pay it down
- Need better processes but don't want to slow down
- Preparing for Series B and need mature technology
- Performance issues becoming more frequent
- Difficult to hire and retain good engineers
- Founder-engineer(s) are overwhelmed
- MVP is live, users are growing, but the system is starting to break
- Growing team from 1-3 to 5-10+ developers
- Technical debt accumulating faster than you can pay it down
- Need better processes but don't want to slow down
- Preparing for Series B and need mature technology
- Performance issues becoming more frequent
- Difficult to hire and retain good engineers
- Founder-engineer(s) are overwhelmed
Common mistakes at this stage
- Scaling too fast without fixing the foundation
- Hiring too many juniors too quickly
- Ignoring technical debt 'until later'
- No clear engineering culture or values
- Poor architectural decisions under pressure
- Weak or no monitoring/alerting
- No clear technical roadmap
- Insufficient documentation
What I do
- Scalability planning: architecture that withstands 10x growth
- Performance optimization: make it fast before it breaks
- Technical debt strategy: what to fix, what to live with
- Monitoring and alerting: know what's happening 24/7
- Incident management: respond to issues effectively
- Feature roadmap: balance new features and infrastructure
- Active hiring: sourcing, interviewing, closing candidates
- Team structure: how to organize a growing team
- Engineering leadership: identifying and developing leads
- Onboarding process: getting new hires productive quickly
- Culture and values: define what great engineering looks like
- Retention strategy: keep your best people
- Agile practices: sprints, standups, retrospectives that work
- Code review standards: quality control without bottlenecks
- CI/CD pipeline: deploy faster with confidence
- Technical standards: document your way of working
- Metrics and KPIs: track what matters
- Communication rhythms: regular syncs with founders
- Quarterly OKRs: align technical and business goals
- Build vs Buy: when to use third-party services vs build your own
- Technical roadmap: 12-month plan aligned with business
- Fundraising support: prepare for Series B due diligence
- Architecture decision records: document key decisions
- Vendor management: negotiate with providers, services, contractors
How it works
Recommended package: Growth CTO
Month 1-2: Assessment and quick wins
Weeks 1-8Comprehensive technical audit. Team capability assessment. Identify and fix critical issues. Process improvements. Set up hiring pipeline.
Month 3-6: Building foundation
Weeks 9-24Execute architecture optimization roadmap. Key hires (senior engineers, potential leads). Establish and refine processes. Technical debt reduction sprints. Implement monitoring and alerting.
Month 7-12: Scaling and maturity
Weeks 25-48Scale team to 10+ engineers. Develop engineering leadership. Advanced practices (A/B testing, feature flags). Performance optimization. Prepare for Series B.
Results You'll Achieve
- Engineering team grown to 5-10+ people
- System performance improved 3-5x
- Technical debt under control (managed roadmap)
- Clear engineering culture and values
- Mature development processes
- Strong engineering leadership emerging
- Architecture ready for next stage of growth
- Successful Series B technical due diligence
Success metrics
- Team velocity increased 2-3x
- Production incidents reduced by 50-70%
- Time to hire reduced from 60 to 30 days
- Employee retention >90%
- Deploy frequency: multiple times per day
- Mean time to recovery: <1 hour
Pricing
Contract Length:
Growth CTO
10 hours per week, 40 hours per month
Post-Seed to Series A startups actively building product and team (3 to 10 engineers).
- Weekly call with founders (1 hour)
- Bi-weekly sprint reviews with the team
- Active hiring involvement: sourcing, interviews, offers, onboarding
- Product architecture and technical roadmap ownership
- Emergency availability for critical situations
- Slack support (24-hour response time)
Package price
$6,000per month
Related services
Frequently asked questions
Ready to scale?
Start with a free 30-minute consultation. We'll discuss your goals, challenges, and determine how I can help.