#021 - Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS
What is a Fractional CTO
Fractional CTO February
For the month of February, I will explore the concept of a Fractional CTO and the benefits of hiring one for your SaaS offering. I will touch on various themes, kinds, types, and topics around Fractional CTOs. Feel free to share this with anyone in need of one, or someone looking to become one. This week's post defines a Fractional CTO and their skillset.
Senior Leader
A Fractional CTO has various roles as a senior technical advisor and the right hand of the founder or CEO.
The Fractional CTO is:
Tasked with ensuring that the technical decisions are sound
Ensures technical applications, patterns, and practices are implemented
Provides guidance and lessons learned from at least a decade of experience as a SaaS leader
Extends, enhances, and furthers the vision of the founder
Creates and mentors a team of software developers, architects, and designers
Software Architect with Business Acumen
With a decade or more of experience as a Software Architect leader, a solid Fractional CTO will have many diverse experiences to call upon to ensure sound technical decisions are made. The Fractional CTO must ensure the appropriate technology is used in all scenarios and must decide when to “build” vs “buy”. Every line of code purchased instead of developed is one less line of code that will require debugging and support in the long run. Ensuring that the software you are creating, and thus supporting, is delivering real differentiation is a metric to use when making the “build” vs “buy” decision. (Seet this blog post, Build vs Buy for more on build vs buy). A Fractional CTO must have an eye on the business’s profitability as well; and be able to work with other senior leaders to manifest and set the business vision while keeping limitations (time, money, and feasibility) top of mind in decision-making. Providing “adult supervision” for the software architecture for stakeholders and team members is a core capability required to ensure the project stays on track.
Technical Conscience
Another important skill is that of Technical Conscience or BS detector. A Fractional CTO must make sure that the right technical decisions are made, and that the technical foundation is strong, while also malleable. Sometimes it can be slightly cheaper to select an inexpensive hosting provider, but going with one of the hyper-scalers and their worldwide reach of infrastructure delivery is a better decision for the young SaaS organization. The Fractional CTO will make recommendations around programming languages, runtimes, databases, data storage, and networking. They must also ensure important practices like separations of concerns, modularity, and sound object-oriented principles are followed by all. As the code base matures, a Fractional CTO will ensure success by ensuring test cases are created. A technical conscience developed over the years in the software development industry will inform a Fractional CTO’s decision-making process when weighing technical decisions against tradeoffs and making sure the architecture supports the upgrading of technology as new and improved ways are developed. Acting as a Technical Conscience will prevent countless errors and mistakes, and keep the software project on track.
Chief Error Preventer
The Fractional CTO is responsible for ensuring errors are either avoided or quickly mitigated. They will create procedures for gathering metrics and implementing proper processes like CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) into the developer's workflow. Doing so ensures two things. First, it ensures that all software deployments follow a repeatable process. Second, if an error occurs during deployment, rolling back or rolling out a new update is quick and painless. A Fractional CTO will implement appropriate testing and validation of software updates, before pushing updates to users. Building repeatable software development processes and updates will prevent errors and downtime for the SaaS offering.
Team Builder
}Like a conductor for an orchestra or a coach for a sports team, the Fractional CTO’s job is to find the best person to put into each of the needed positions. Hiring for diverse opinions, experiences, and development backgrounds helps ensure that ideas are challenged, implemented, and then manifest as their best implementations. The Fractional CTO will develop a consistent set of questions to vet potential team members. And once the team is in place, the Fractional CTO must be a great mentor. Balancing pushing people to greatness while avoiding burnout is an art practiced by the best Fractional CTOs.
Designer
The top Fractional CTOs will use the methods of Design to create the best experiences possible for users. They will have empathy for end users and will use proven research methods to gather ideas to improve the offerings. Defining and following a repeatable process to gather this feedback and bring it to the development team for implementation is the least celebrated role of the Fractional CTO, but it is paramount for the successful delivery and ongoing improvements to the offering. The days of innovation coming on down from the Catherdral (smart engineers and leaders toiling in a cubicle) are long over. It is only through the robust use of Design Tradecraft that you can lower your risks and costs when measured against the time and money it takes to deliver new innovative capabilities, while simultaneously defending the offering from the competition.
The Fractional CTO wears many hats, and the skillset above is by no means exhaustive. Everyone technical might not be cut out to be a Fractional CTO, but for those that can deliver, their future is very bright. What are other skills that your organization requires in a Fractional CTO?
Thank You
Jim ‘The Designatic’ Tyrrell