Fractional Resources

Someone posted in CTO Craft recently:

“I’d like to focus on something more specific than just ‘whatever a CTO does, just fractional.’”

Good. You should.

You can’t do the whole C-level role part-time - that’s what makes you fractional rather than interim. Pick your slice and own it.

Not sure what that slice could be? Here are some that work:

The Infrastructure Cleanup

You help post-Series A teams untangle their mess before it collapses. AWS spend is out of control. Deploys break everything. Nobody knows what’s running where.

You’re not there to build new features. You’re there to make what they have actually work.

The Founding Engineer Bridge

You help brilliant technical people become leaders. The CEO hired someone straight out of a PhD program. Great at code, lost at everything else.

You’re not replacing them. You’re translating between their brain and the business until they can do it themselves.

The Strategic Advisor

You show up for board meetings and big decisions. You keep their tech choices from drifting into the ditch. No daily management. No deliverables. Just context and judgment when it matters.

The CTO-Until-They-Can-Hire-One

You do the hiring. The architecture. The roadmap. You’re building the foundation, not staying to run it.

Think 3-6 months and out. Your job is to set them up so they don’t need you.

The Post-Exit Safety Net

You built it. Now you’ll answer Slack when things break. They pay for your brain, not your time. You’re insurance, not guidance.

The Process Builder

You don’t own code. You own the system around the code. How work gets prioritized. How the team talks to the business. How decisions get made.

You’re the one who makes it possible for the CEO to act like a CEO.

This is the what you do part of your niche. You still need to figure out who you do it for and how you package it. But start here.

Pick one. Get good at talking about it. Show examples of problems you’ve solved in that space.

You can always change later. But you have to start somewhere.

Otherwise you’re just another fractional CTO in a sea of fractional CTOs. And that’s a great way to get passed over for someone who made it easy to say yes.

Need help figuring out which slice fits your experience? Book a discovery call and let’s talk through what actually works.