#022 - Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS
Fractional CTOs to Help You
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, 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 the roles a Fractional CTO can have in an organization.
Right Hand to the Founder
The Right Hand Fractional CTO will take the founder's ideas and vision and make them a technical reality. Everything technical is on their plate, including the technical architecture and where it should run. The Right Hand will also build a software team that the CEO can rely on in order to scale the offering. It is critical for the Right Hand Fractional CTO and the team they hire to build a sound technical foundation so that the business can scale with speed and agility. In order to build the foundation, the Fractional CTO will leverage Design Tradecraft, like the 10 Types of Innovation and Service Journey Maps, to ensure a successful and impactful Human experience. This rounds out the core activities of a Fractional CT as the Right Hand to the Founder.
SaaS Rescue
It’s possible for a non-technical founder to get in over their head. If you ever watched the A-Team, you know that “if you have a problem, and no one else can help, if you can find them, maybe you can hire,”... a Fractional CTO.
A few of the most expensive problems when starting a SaaS include:
Working with over-scheduled agency employees who are not dedicated to your delivery and success
Making poor decisions around the technical architecture
Failing to address the needs of users where they are, and instead guessing at the needs of users according to where the technical team hopes they might be
Not understanding the ramifications of technical decisions or speaking a different language than the developers
As a long-tenured technical person, a SaaS Rescue Fractional CTO can sniff out these problems in minutes, and provide expert guidance to get your SaaS offering back on track. By interviewing your current team, they can uncover the competence of the delivery team, and figure out if they are salvageable. The Saas Rescue Fractional CTO can help rein in and provide guidance for future technical decisions and course-correct prior mistakes. They will provide the skills, leadership, mentoring, and processes necessary to update your offering in a sound and robust way. In addition, they will coach or remove team members that are not delivering at the level necessary to grow your business..
Team Build Out
For the offering that is sailing along with a non-technical founder, and everything is mostly going well, a Fractional CTO can be used to help build out the team to deliver scale and capability. A Fractional CTO will have a solid background in interviewing and hiring developers They have developed a 6th sense that allows them to suss out the posers from the very capable developers available in the marketplace. Finding those developer diamonds in the rough is so important for rounding out a successful and highly-functional developer team. Injecting the right perspectives, processes, and skills into the existing developer team, while not breaking the existing capabilities and delivery is the key success marker for the Team Build Out Fractional CTO.
Fractional CTO Founder
The natural state for technical developers is curiosity and creation. As a Fractional CTO Founder, you have a technical vision or offering you think the world needs. However, the technical founder typically has a few gaps, including:
Marketing
Product Market Fit
Sales
Copywriting
Contracts
Website Development
Hiring, and finding partners or mentors to close these gaps is paramount for ensuring your success as a Fractional CTO founder.
Mentor
The Fractional CTO mentor provides dedicated phone, slack, and/or text-a-friend support and mentoring for a SaaS leader. Oftentimes technical team members are using jargon and terms that might not be clear to the non-technical founder. By providing the decoder ring, and being a sounding board, the Mentor Fractional CTO will provide translations and become a sounding board so that the non-technical founder isn’t taken advantage of by someone masquerading as a smart developer.
CTO Augmentation
Chief Technical Officers and senior technical leaders are sometimes tasked with initiatives or improvements that they may not have the skills or the team to deliver on. A Fractional CTO can provide the skills needed to take on new and exciting projects while leaving the existing team alone and letting them continue to do what they do best. They may also bring an existing team to solve the challenges of the CTO. The CTO Augmentation Fractional CTO can also coach the technical leaders on how to scale new projects with the existing team.
Due Diligence
A Fractional CTO can provide guidance to a non-technical leader looking to purchase an existing SaaS. There is a fair amount of technical due diligence to be conducted.
Due diligence includes:
Interviewing existing developers
Reviewing development and deployment processes
Auditing technology stacks
Providing insights into the current state of the Design
Reviewing scale and future capabilities
Providing recommendations for growth and a technical future for down the road
With the time spent, insight gathered, and feedback delivered, the purchaser should think about bringing on the Due Diligence Fractional CTO as a permanent Fractional CTO as the senior technical advisor and leader.
As you can see, a Fractional CTO can be beneficial in many different capacities. But the list above is by no means an exhaustive list of the types of Fractional CTOs. If you are using a Fractional CTO in some other capacity, I’d love to hear about it.
Thank You
Jim ‘The Designatic’ Tyrrell