Fractional CTO
Part-time senior technical leadership for your roadmap, team, vendors and budget. You get the decisions a CTO makes without the full-time hire.
Who this is for
- Merchants with no senior technical lead in-house, including stores on Adobe Commerce and Magento
- Founders who rely on an agency and want an independent view of its work
- Small engineering teams that need an architect to set direction and standards
What you get
A technical roadmap you own
Twelve months of platform work in business terms, ordered by risk and revenue, reviewed every quarter.
Decisions with the trade-offs written down
Build or buy, upgrade or wait, replatform or stay, agency or in-house, each with cost, risk and a recommendation.
A team that ships to a standard
Requirements broken into tickets, code-review rules and release habits your engineers and agency follow.
Vendors held to account
Estimates, invoices and pull requests checked by someone who has built the same thing before.
How it works
First month
Assess
Every month
Lead
Every quarter
Report
In detail
Someone has to own the technical roadmap and tell everyone involved, from the board to the agency, what happens next and why. For most merchants that is a part-time job.
Each month I join your planning, make or prepare the architecture decisions, review the code that matters and sit in on vendor calls. I have done this work for Teabloom since 2020 as its fractional solution architect. I own the technical roadmap there, and I designed and delivered the sales architecture behind seven channels and a dedicated B2B wholesale site. At MarketNation the role means leading a team of three engineers on a deeply customized build, from requirements and roadmap to work decomposition and code-review standards.
You get one accountable person for platform decisions, without an executive’s salary and equity or the months it takes to hire one. When the platform is stable and a permanent hire makes sense, I help you write the role and interview candidates, then hand over.
I have spent 17 years in e-commerce, all of them on Magento and Adobe Commerce, and I hold the Adobe Commerce Architect Master certification.
We start with a one-month assessment of your platform, team, vendors and backlog. It ends in a written roadmap, and from then on I work a fixed allocation of days each month.
Questions
How much of your time do we get?
A fixed number of days each month, part-time and set per month under a monthly retainer. Those days go to your planning, architecture decisions, code review and vendor calls. Every quarter I report progress against the roadmap on one page, and we re-plan the next quarter.
How do we start?
With a one-month assessment of your platform, team, vendors and backlog. At the end you have a written roadmap that orders the platform work by risk and revenue. After that I work the agreed number of days each month.
Can you work with our agency and our own developers?
Yes, the role is built around working with them. I break requirements into tickets and set the code-review rules and release habits your engineers and agency follow. I also check their estimates, invoices and pull requests.
What happens when we want a full-time CTO?
When the platform is stable and a permanent hire makes sense, I help you write the role and interview candidates. Then I hand over to the person you hire, with the roadmap and the decisions behind it already written down.
Related case study
7Sales channels
One catalog across seven sales channels and a B2B site
Read the case study