How to become a Fractional CTO?

Focusing on building up your skills and experience is key!

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Intro

Recently, there has been an increase in the popularity of fractional roles.

I see this trend quite frequently → non-technical founder has an idea and hires a Fractional CTO to help them build it.

Instead of going for the technical co-founder, they go for a Fractional CTO. The Fractional CTO then assesses the requirements and hires the right tech team needed to execute the idea.

If the idea turns out to be successful, then the focus is on scaling and growing the team. And that’s where normally my suggestion is to think about bringing in a full-time CTO.

In today’s article, we are going to go through what is a Fractional CTO and how can you become one!

Together with

Sergio Visinoni

, Fractional CTO and author of

Sudo Make Me a CTO

, we did a lightning lesson How Fractional CTOs make huge impact on 30% time.

The event was done in collaboration with Maven and in this article, we are doing a summary of what we talked about.

You can check the recording here - forward the recording to about 7 minutes (that’s when the lesson starts and you’ll need to enter your email to view it).

P.S. Today is also Sergio’s birthday 🎉🥳 I wish you a Happy Birthday and a great celebration. It’s been a real blast collaborating with you on this!

Let’s go straight into the summary.

What is a Fractional CTO?

Both me and Sergio agree that there are many ways we can describe a Fractional CTO. Here is one way we could describe it:

A Fractional CTO is normally an experienced tech leader who takes a CTO role on a certain % of the time, normally that’s around 30%.

The company that hires a Fractional CTO gets a person who is very experienced for less amount of $ than they would get for a full-time CTO who may be less experienced. That is the key difference.

For some companies, especially smaller to mid-size companies, It's hard to afford a very experienced person full-time and that’s where a Fractional CTO becomes a good option.

So it’s a matter of time vs experience vs compensation when assessing either having a Fractional or full-time CTO.

How to become a Fractional CTO?

It’s very important that you develop the much-needed experience first, before becoming a Fractional CTO. So suggestion from both me and Sergio is to become a full-time CTO first.

Of course, it’s not mandatory to do that, but we believe you’ll have a much better time and overall success if you do that first.

Here are 6 ways you can grow toward a CTO role:
1. Start a company
2. Become a founding engineer
3. Go through the Management path
4. Go through the Architecture path
5. Go through the IC path
6. Become a CTO through other roles, mostly Product

We wrote a detailed guide together with

John Crickett

regarding becoming a CTO here: 12 ways you can become a CTO (paid article).

Sergio decided to become a Fractional CTO after 20 years of experience in the industry

He’s been covering a lot of leadership roles in technology all the way from 2013, roles spanning from Director, VP of Engineering and CTO.

He worked for all different kinds of companies, from small, mid and all the way to enterprise companies. That gave him a lot of perspective. He’s seen what works in small teams and also what works in bigger teams.

He took the decision to become a Fractional CTO this year in January to get out of the traditional 9 to 5 work setup. He believed there was a market for him and that's what he’s been doing since January.

He currently has one Fractional CTO engagement, plus other more like consultancy advisory-type roles.

A great thing about being a Fractional CTO is that you can do a lot of complementary things

Sergio mentioned consulting. That’s a big part of what you can do because many companies are looking for external input on their processes, codebase, hiring, overall team, engineering culture, etc.

And that’s also what I do a lot these days. Your experience and external input are very valuable for companies. Companies know and understand that spending a small amount of $ can save a large amount in the long term.

You can also do coaching + mentoring and you can also work on something else in the time that you have available.

For example, I am writing and continuously improving this newsletter + teaching a course Senior Engineer to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role.

It’s up to you how you spend your time, that’s the greatest part in my opinion.

That’s exactly the reason why I decided to become a Fractional CTO and Tech advisor

I’ve had full-time roles for over 11 years in which I’ve been able to grow from engineer all the way to CTO and the big reason for that was freelance work:

• doing projects,

• consulting and advising,

• coaching and mentoring.

That enabled me to develop broad experience in a much shorter amount of time and it played a big part in how I was able to grow from engineer all the way to CTO role.

You can read more about it here: My secret for growing from engineer to CTO (paid article).

In the last 2 years, while being a CTO, I was saying no to a lot of such opportunities, because I was doing a full-time role + I was also writing this newsletter, teaching a course and actively posting on LinkedIn / X.

Now, I have much more time to focus on continuously improving this newsletter + my course and also spend time on various other things, mostly doing tech advising and coaching these days.

This has already shown very positively on the growth of the newsletter and also I can really optimize my time on a daily basis.

Plus, I am getting a lot of insights from various of different challenges that companies/individuals are facing, which helps me a lot to further expand my experience.

Here are some stats of the newsletter changes from October to now:

• ARR: October 1: $43.3k → November 17: $55.8k (+$12.5k)

• Subscribers: October 1: 76.9k → November 17: 88.2k (+11.3k)

• Paid subscribers: October 1: 625 → November 17: 779 (+154)

Sincerely thank you for all of your support!

If you wish to grow toward a Fractional CTO role, which skills do you need to develop?

This was also the topic that we talked about with Sergio and I asked him exactly that. Sergio mentioned that he spends his time in about:

20-40% → Strategic planning and alignment

• Working with the CEO/CPO to understand and refine business priorities.

• Architecture / System Design (with your team).

• Figuring out the right order of execution, priorities, and tradeoffs.

20-40% → Execution

• Translate long-term plans into actionable plans for the short-term horizon.

• Tracking and communicating upwards, downwards, and sideways on progress.

• Technical Decisions, PR reviews, and other types of hands-on work.

20-40% → Team Management and development

• Making sure everyone is set up for success: having the right setup, working on the right project, right priorities, and a manageable workload.

• Making space for individual conversations to surface employees' needs and desires for growth.

• Teaming up with team members on specific needs or issues where they'd benefit from support (good mentoring and alignment opportunity).

The overall percentage varies from week to week, based on what’s going to be the most important for the business.

How do you develop these skills?

And then we also talked about how to develop these skills. This is what Sergio mentioned:

Strategic planning and alignment

• Practice speaking with the business (CEO, CFO, CPO, CMO, etc.).

• Practice thinking in terms of outcomes for technical investments.

• Document tradeoffs and evaluate alternative solutions (not only the ones you are in love with).

Execution

• Get organized, become obsessive with how to use your time / your team's time.

• Practice communicating in written/oral form to people with different backgrounds.

• Use writing as a way to clarify your thinking.

Team Management and development

• Spend time with people in your team, and develop a genuine interest in them.

• Overcome the fear of being perceived as "micromanaging", as long as you're explaining your decisions and are open to feedback.

• Practice giving up the driving seat and taking the passenger seat.

We also answered many interesting questions

We answered questions like:

• How do you set boundaries on your time as a Fractional CTO?

• The reason for the increase in popularity of Fractional CTO work, why is the case for that?

• How do you price your services?

• How do you manage your time and keep control of your time?

Make sure to check out the recording to find out the answers!

Here is the link to the recording - forward the recording to about 7 minutes (that’s when the lesson starts and you’ll need to enter your email to view it).

Last words

Thanks to Sergio for the great collab → both on event and on this newsletter. Make sure to follow him on LinkedIn and subscribe to his newsletter

Sudo Make Me a CTO

.

Let’s end this article with:

Focusing on building up your skills and experience is key, that is going to help you to provide a LOT of value in shorter amount of time.

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