What is a Fractional CTO?

Do you need someone to lead your tech whilst you focus on your business? We provide this support without the cost and commitment of hiring a full time Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

With our Fractional CTO service you gain access to a team of experts who can support you and your team with everything from strategy and roadmap planning, to mentoring your tech team and implementing processes and frameworks to increase accuracy and productivity.

We get the ball rolling by taking time to understand your vision and the challenges and opportunities you and your business face. This allows us to work in close alignment, handling the tech to support you as you focus on growth.

What You Can Expect:

  • A deep understanding of your business and your vision
  • Strategic planning and tech/product roadmaps
  • Budget validation and de-risking investment
  • Accelerating your team - mentoring and guidance
  • Accelerating your team - processes and frameworks
  • Keeping you up to date on the latest technologies and trends
  • Support with getting investment ready

Our Fractional CTO Includes

Tech Strategy

We’ll conduct a Product and Team Audit to understand your vision, challenges faced, resources available and opportunities to leverage. This will inform a Product Roadmap, an evolving strategy to guide product development and wider technical considerations like infrastructure and team, ensuring projects align with business goals and budgets.

  • Tech Strategy

    We’ll conduct a Product and Team Audit to understand your vision, challenges faced, resources available and opportunities to leverage. This will inform a Product Roadmap, an evolving strategy to guide product development and wider technical considerations like infrastructure and team, ensuring projects align with business goals and budgets.

Team Acceleration

We’ll help you get more out of your team. Your people will benefit from “hand on the shoulder” support to improve their technical skills and awareness of how their work impacts the business, and to increase responsibility. Your processes will benefit from the identification, streamlining and automation of repetitive tasks like DevOps and infrastructure maintenance.

  • Team Acceleration

    We’ll help you get more out of your team. Your people will benefit from “hand on the shoulder” support to improve their technical skills and awareness of how their work impacts the business, and to increase responsibility. Your processes will benefit from the identification, streamlining and automation of repetitive tasks like DevOps and infrastructure maintenance.

Investment Readiness

Our extensive experience with start-ups and scale-ups means we can guide you through every step of the investment readiness journey – from roadmap and budget validation to investor interview support and due diligence. It could also include de-risking single points of failure, optimising infrastructure for more scalable margins or achieving accreditations.

  • Investment Readiness

    Our extensive experience with start-ups and scale-ups means we can guide you through every step of the investment readiness journey – from roadmap and budget validation to investor interview support and due diligence. It could also include de-risking single points of failure, optimising infrastructure for more scalable margins or achieving accreditations.

Your Tech Compass

Because we dedicate significant resources to keeping up with the latest and greatest that technology has to offer, you don’t have to. We’ll help you filter out the noise, the overhyped tech and the ten minute trends, fast-tracking you to the most innovative, cutting edge and highest impact solutions that deliver real and scalable results.

  • Your Tech Compass

    Because we dedicate significant resources to keeping up with the latest and greatest that technology has to offer, you don’t have to. We’ll help you filter out the noise, the overhyped tech and the ten minute trends, fast-tracking you to the most innovative, cutting edge and highest impact solutions that deliver real and scalable results.

How It Works

  1. North Star Workshop

    Getting a deep understanding of your vision, business and challenges

    • More Info

      The North Star Workshop creates a shared vision between you and us, avoiding common project pitfalls caused by misaligned expectations. Clients find it helps them discover new perspectives, risks, and opportunities, and unify their team’s vision.

  2. Product and Team Audit

    Get into the details of your product and the team supporting it

    • More Info

      We analyse the technical quality of your tech, and capabilities and processes of your team, to identify any barriers to frictionless scaling. You might have a great product team, but they could be held back by inefficient DevOps or poor planning and product management. Our goal is to identify and present solutions to any deep-rooted inefficiencies.

  3. Implementation

    Implementing solutions from the audit

    • More Info

      This stage varies depending on your business, but it’s all about getting hands on and removing technical or operational barriers to growth. This could involve implementing a new DevOps and QA process to increase your teams’ output, moving cloud infrastructure to optimise costs, identifying opportunities to implement AI and much more.

  4. Handover

    Handing solutions over to your team

    • More Info

      Our Fractional CTO solution is about giving you what you want. If you want a hands on, fully or partially integrated partner to keep delivering, that’s great. If your goal is to ensure total independence from third-parties and become completely self-sufficient, we can provide the tools, skills and leadership needed to make that happen.

Ready to talk about your product?

Book a Free Discovery Call

500+
Total Products Built
250k+
Users Supported
20
Years Running
300+
Clients Worked With
200+
Combined years of experience

The Benefits of Fractional CTO

The Fractional CTO service accelerates your growth, allowing you to do more with the team and product that you have. By understanding your vision we can act as your proxy when working with the product team – ensuring their operations are as efficient as possible, and remain aligned with the goals of the business.

Additionally our experience allows us to identify and handle risks and opportunities that might not be on your radar as the founder – or that you simply might not have the capacity to think about. You can focus on growing the business, knowing that your tech and product will back you up.

  • Team of Experts

    Instead of relying on an individual who can become another single point of failure you have access to a team of experts. This means you can deploy specialist skills like UX, Testing or Infrastructure all under the auspices of a Fractional CTO, and all aligned with one vision and plan.

  • Technology Agnostic

    With broad experience of products and technologies we’ll help you get the most out of what you have – we won’t insist you rebuild everything in a flavour of the month technology just because we are interested in it. We know that the tech is just secondary to the improvement it creates for your business.

  • Hands On

    We’ll work hands-on to manage, execute and measure any implementation. Whether this is hands-on infrastructure work or code reviews and coaching we’ll be there for the whole journey. We don’t just give you a report and leave you to execute it.

  • Collaborative

    We’ve worked on enough project builds to know that everything is done for a reason – we won’t judge or complain about past tech decisions – this is about improving things for the future. It sounds trite but this is crucial for building trust and working collaboratively with your team to get the best result.

How People Feel About Working With Us

5/5
The Tech Dept originally came on board to build a POC for Persi, to support both our route to market, and validate the concept. Following this Chris and his team have been invaluable in supporting Persi on our tech journey and scoping out a clear roadmap and SRS doc to support the build and launch of our MVP. Ultimately this has allowed us to secure the funding required to do so, so now the hard work starts, and I am thrilled that TTD will be our partners in delivering it.
Olivia Parkes

Persi

5/5
I just love The Tech Dept. I think they’re brilliant. I love them as people. They are really easy to work with. From a charity POV, a lot of private sector companies take advantage of us. We’re easy pickings. They bamboozle us. It’s really nice to have found a company to work with who are on the same page and have our best interest at heart. It’s never felt like a transactional relationship. More like a long-term partnership.
Helen O’Donnell

Children’s University

5/5
The Tech Dept are aware of the pitfalls and things that can go wrong – they’re grounded in reality. You can count on them because they’ve been through the good, the bad and the ugly
Ali Munro

Flutterlab

5/5
The Tech Dept understands our product and what we’re trying to achieve. We have a great working relationship with them. I like that they’re not too techie. They help us solve the problem simply. 'This is the problem; this is how we do it. There’s no rubbish around the side'. In contrast, other dev agencies need us to spell it out. If we don’t get the explanation exactly right, they don’t get it right. So they build the wrong thing.
Clare Baldwin

QHS (Vaccination Track)

5/5
We needed skilled technical expertise and strategic capabilities to help us deliver a number of complex digital projects. We engaged TTD as our “Plug-In Tech Team”, it worked really well. Their devs, strategists and PM joined our internal team and achieved successful delivery across all projects. They’re a brilliant team and we feel lucky to be working with them.
Pippa Irvine

D&AD

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Can you work with our existing team?

    Yes – we’re happy to work alongside in-house teams, if you have an in-house team part of our objective will be to support them to work as efficiently as possible. Improving things like DevOps, project management structure and testing processes so they can deliver more valuable work.

  • Are you going to recommend we rebuild our tech in your preferred stack?

    No we’re tech agnostic – the tech is just a tool to allow you to do what you want to do. We’d always look first at how you can mitigate any issues with the tech you have.

    The only time we’d recommend rebuilding is if it has real world business benefits for you – that clearly outweigh the effort required.

  • Can you actually build things for us if we need you to?

    Yes – we’ve got a team of experienced product builders from UX to infrastructure who can get hands on and deliver projects and fill capacity or skills gaps to get a product over the line.

    It’s this capacity that sets us apart from a traditional Fractional CTO.

  • Can you support us with investor interviews or due diligence?

    Yes we can support you with the technical aspects of fundraising and due diligence, including attending pitches/interviews with investors if required.

  • Do you take equity?

    No, we don’t take equity for any of the services we offer.