Was your CTO hire a mistake?

Picture this: You’re a CEO and/or founder and you hire your first Solution Engineering role as a CTO. Six months to two years down the road and the minimum viable product (MVP) has been deployed. But the hiring of a qualified team or processes to govern how work gets done is well behind schedule, if existing at all. What went wrong?

You hired a software engineer and expected them to blossom into a CTO.

This, or variations of this, is common in startups that are maturing into later stages. It happens a lot with startups that are based out of or around students coming out of university.

Why did this happen? The software engineer you hired may have never had experience being around, or even considered what a seasoned CTO would do. They simply don’t have the experience you were hoping they would have or could develop on their own.

You had great intentions but hired the wrong role at the wrong time.

In the beginning, you need to get that MVP out and hopefully get funding. It’s a loose run to the finish and deployment of the MVP. However, when you mature, you expect to grow bigger but also become more reliable, accountable, and way more predictable.

What you should have done is hire a CTO with experience from initial round funding. Of course, your reaction is we cannot keep a CTO busy. Let’s take a moment and first define the role of CTO should look like before addressing that.

A qualified CTO is roughly 80% strategic, 10% tactical, and 10% product focused.

Most startups and small businesses would rightly think that in stage B or C they would not have enough strategy needs to justify a CTO that doesn’t do more tactical. You're wrong and right. You need someone with strategic experience, just less than full time. Let me introduce you to the concept of Fractional CTO. A full CTO in duties, but part time and often contracted. This way you lose all the overhead of an FTE, get the strategic skills you need, and pay for only what time you need.

You could hire a Fraction CTO for one to two days a week and use the savings to get another software engineer.

But what if you want to keep the CTO you hired but want to get them the support to help them be successful? This is where you could contract a Fractional CTO, like me, to coach and mentor your current CTO. It will take some time and may amount to contracting a few hours a week of Fractional CTO time. As your CTO matures, you can gradually reduce the hours of the Fractional CTO, eventually leading to just mentorship hours monthly.

If you want to learn more about Fractional CTO services, see my website: FractionalAdvantage.com and/or schedule some time on my calendar at: FractionalAdvantage.com/contact

#ceo #founder #startup #smallbusiness #fractionalcto