Pattern 01
No in-house dev
You're a 5–50 person B2B service company. The website + a handful of SaaS tools are your tech stack. Decisions land on your desk that you don't have language for.
§ Tier 03 · Fractional
Fractional Tech Lead. Senior judgement. Not a CTO hire.
For B2B service companies and nonprofits without in-house engineering — but with consequential web infrastructure. Roadmap, vendor review, code review, hiring loops, and "should we build this or buy it" answered in writing. Across active retainers, decision latency drops from ~3 weeks to 2 business days. When implementation is needed, route through the Sprint Catalogue.
§ 03.03.01
What you get · what you don't
IncludedEach month
- Quarterly roadmap · prioritised by impact-vs-cost · written
- Bi-weekly 60-min strategy call · agenda published 24 h before
- Vendor evaluation memos · "should we use X" · written + scored
- Code / architecture review · async · turnaround 48 h
- Hiring loops · JD review, interview design, candidate scoring
- Incident post-mortems · written · blameless template
- Direct Slack / inbox access · async · 1 business day SLA
- Monthly written memo · forwardable to board / investors
ExcludedBy default
- Implementation hours · use Sprint Catalogue
- On-call / pager rotation · not a 24×7 service
- Acting as legal CTO / signing officer · not insurable as that
- Equity-in-lieu-of-cash arrangements
- Investor pitch deck production / fundraising support
- Recruiting / executive search
- Vendor procurement on your account
§ 03.03.02
Who this is for
Pattern 02
Nonprofit, lean budget
You run digital operations for a nonprofit. You can't hire a CTO. You need someone senior to call when the agency proposes something that smells off — and to send a written second opinion.
Pattern 03
Bridge to a hire
You know you'll hire a full-time engineering lead in 6–12 months. Until then, you need someone whose JD you can copy, whose hiring rubric you can use, and who can sit in on the loop.
§ 03.03.03
Common questions
What's the difference vs. just hiring a senior dev?
A senior dev codes. A fractional tech lead writes the brief that the senior dev (yours or mine) executes. The brief is what's hard. Most SMBs that try to hire their way out of this end up with an excellent contractor and no closer to a roadmap. The 20 hrs / month here typically generates 60 — 120 hrs / month of correctly-scoped implementation work that lands in the Sprint Catalogue or your own team's backlog.
Can I add implementation hours to the retainer?
Yes — as a separate sprint, separately priced. Folding implementation into the retainer is what makes most fractional engagements break down: the strategic work gets crowded out by the deliverable backlog. I keep them split deliberately. Common follow-ons: Audit Sprint for diagnostics, Launch Sprint for a full rebuild, or the Care Plan retainer for ongoing live-site maintenance.
What happens at month 3?
You can cancel without notice (minimum already served). Or extend month-to-month. Or commit to 12 months at -1 month price (i.e. 11 months billed for 12 months served). The 90-day written assessment in month 3 is yours either way — it's a real document, written for you and forwardable to your board, regardless of what you choose next.
§ 03.03.04