Fractional CTO
Senior technical leadership that owns your architecture, vendors, roadmap, and budget, without the full-time hire.
A fractional CTO engagement gives you a senior engineer in the room for the decisions that are expensive to get wrong: what to build, what to buy, who to hire, which contract to sign. We own the technical roadmap, coordinate developers and vendors, and translate between the business and the code, at a fraction of the cost and risk of a full-time executive.
Most growing companies hit the same wall: the founder is making technical decisions they aren't equipped to make, or a dev team is running without senior direction. Hiring a full-time CTO costs $250k+ and six months of searching. A fractional CTO closes that gap now.
We take real ownership, not advice from the sidelines. That means owning the architecture and the trade-offs behind it, managing offshore and contract developers, negotiating vendor contracts, holding the budget, and giving leadership straight answers about what's working and what isn't.
This is a live, proven practice rather than a service-page aspiration. Connect Upward currently serves as fractional CTO for Pitch Please, a mobile app startup.
What you get
- Technical strategy and roadmap ownership
- Architecture decisions and code review standards
- Vendor evaluation, contract negotiation, and budget oversight
- Offshore and contract developer coordination
- Hiring support: job specs, technical interviews, onboarding
- Plain-English reporting to founders and stakeholders
Good fit when
- You have developers (in-house, offshore, or agency) but no senior technical direction
- You're about to make a build decision or sign a contract that's expensive to get wrong
- You need a CTO's judgment for 5 to 15 hours a week, not 40
Questions
How much time does a fractional CTO engagement involve?
Typically 5 to 15 hours per week on a flat monthly retainer, renewed quarterly. Enough to own the roadmap and the hard decisions; not so much that you're paying for idle hours.
How is this different from a consultant?
A consultant hands you a recommendation. A fractional CTO owns the outcome: the roadmap, the vendor relationships, the dev team's output, and the budget. When something breaks, it's our problem too.
Can you work with our existing developers or agency?
Yes, and it's the most common setup. We direct and review the work of in-house, offshore, or agency developers so their output actually matches the business goals.
Talk through fractional cto for your business.
A free 30-minute call is usually enough to tell whether this is the right move, and we'll say so honestly if it isn't.