Senior Judgment, Without the Hire — a fractional CTO, or a faster team
A recurring senior advisory engagement from 8 hours a month: fractional-CTO cover, running the department, training the team, and making your engineers faster with AI. We usually start with an audit, so the advice rests on findings rather than guesses.
What You Get
A working management cadence, the numbers that matter for your stage, reviewed on a regular loop that sets goals and plans the work.
One senior brain across whatever the month needs, vendor and architecture decisions, hiring input, or structured upskilling of your team.
How to make your engineers faster with AI on the codebase you actually have: rollout, measurement, and the prerequisites the tools depend on. Not slideware.
What was discussed, decided, and moved, a record legible to whoever you answer to: a board, an operating partner, a CFO.
Why We Usually Start With an Audit
We almost always start with an audit, even though it isn’t required. Advice built on assumptions drifts into expensive opinion; the audit replaces them with findings, and its fix sequence becomes the consulting agenda. Skip it and we work from what we can establish together, but you may pay senior rates to discover what a fixed-price audit answers in week one.
Consulting is influence, not delivery: we prescribe and oversee; your team, or our team augmentation, executes. Hands-on work fits inside consulting hours at the consulting rate, our most expensive way to write code; sustained execution belongs in team augmentation, and we’ll tell you when you’ve crossed that line.
A regular meeting cadence built around your numbers: review what the metrics did, set the next goals, plan the work, repeat.
Running the department: priorities, vendor and architecture decisions, hiring input, and being the senior voice in the room when the business asks engineering questions.
The same hours go into your team, working sessions on the parts of the delivery process the audit flagged, so the capability stays when we leave.
Most engagements mix the modes; the monthly report records which got used.
Under a Board AI Mandate
If the board asked for an AI story and the tooling spend hasn’t moved the numbers, the same hours produce the answer you present upward: we baseline delivery, run the enablement against your own metrics, and report the after: spend tied to time recovered, in language a board or CFO reads without translation.
- 01 Baseline: the delivery numbers as they stand today, measured, not estimated.
- 02 Enablement: fix the loop the tools depend on, with your team, so adoption compounds.
- 03 The after: adoption and delivery measured again, with the narrative attached. Proof, not promises.
When Not to Hire Us for This
If the actual need is people building things every week, this is the wrong shape. Team augmentation or project development is cheaper and more honest.
Consulting needs someone who can change priorities, process, or budget. Without that, the report just records things that didn’t happen.
Below 8 hours a month, or for a one-off opinion, the economics don’t work. A one-time audit answers more than a one-time conversation.
What It Costs
Hours plus a monthly report, because that’s what advisory is: senior attention applied where the month needs it, with a record of what it produced. Below the 8-hour floor nothing compounds. You’d be buying reassurance, not change.
Questions Buyers Actually Ask
Do I need an audit first?
Not required, but we usually recommend one, so the advice starts from findings instead of guesses. Skip it and we work from what we can establish together. The risk is paying senior rates to discover what a fixed-price audit answers in week one.
Is this a fractional CTO?
It can be, one mode of the same engagement. Without a CTO, the consultant runs the tech function; with engineering leadership in place, the same hours go into advisory and training.
Can the consultant write code, not just advise?
Yes, light hands-on work fits inside consulting hours, at the consulting rate. Anything sustained is cheaper as team augmentation, and we’ll say so.
What’s the minimum commitment?
8 hours a month, recurring, with a 2-month notice. No lock-in beyond that. If it isn’t earning its line, two months is how long it takes to stop.
What’s actually in the monthly report?
The meetings, what was decided, and what moved against the goals set the month before, so the engagement is legible to people who weren’t in the room.
We rolled out AI coding tools and delivery barely changed. Is that a consulting problem?
Yes, the most common one we see. The tools usually didn’t fail; the codebase absorbed the gains. We fix the loop they depend on, with your team, and measure before and after.
What does “fix the loop” actually mean?
Tests, CI, code review, and observability, the prerequisites AI tooling needs to pay. Without them, generated code arrives untested and incidents outpace your ship rate. We put them in place with your team, so the capability stays.
The Standard, and the Record
The management cadence consulting installs, what to track, how to plan, is the engineering-os layer of the methodology: the framework the advice comes from.
Read the methodology →Evolve Edits
downtime · per quarterDecade-old portal moving terabytes a month through one on-premise machine
- down from 125, a 90% drop 12 incidents
- upload throughput ~30 MB/s → uncapped
- infrastructure cost · per month $1,700 → $300 −80%
Consumer platform, sensitive data
fixed-price rebuildInvestor-promised B2B milestone blocked by the codebase
- fixed-price rebuild 7 months
- of the eventual engagement spend ~1%
Start With a Discovery Call — we don’t advise blind
A short call to understand where the engineering function is and what it needs. We usually start with the fixed-price audit, from $5K, so we’re prescribing against findings, not assumptions; if it doesn’t justify a retainer, the report is still yours.
Notes on Building High-Quality Software
A short founder’s note and a digest of what we’ve published, sent only when there’s something worth the inbox.