You raised, sales are working and the team is past fifteen engineers, yet releases keep slipping. The missing piece is usually engineering management, not more engineers: someone who owns release dates, technical risk and who decides what gets built next. A fractional CTO maps who decides what, sets a delivery rhythm, and either hires the leader you need or runs engineering until one is in place.
Best for: investors before a deal · funded companies where releases slip and nobody owns engineering · founders who lost their CTO · teams putting computer vision or AI into production at scale.
Selected cases from these experts’ profiles.
Sales and product are strong, the CEO and CFO are capable, but there is no engineering leadership. The product lead assigns tasks to about fifteen engineers, technical leaders don't last, and releases slip. The expert starts with careful interviews (people under pressure don't need to hear "it's all bad"), then sets up who decides what, the delivery process, and either hires a CTO or acts as one.
An ownership map, a delivery rhythm and a hiring plan.
An investor sees a portfolio company that has raised a round, and its technology looks wrong. The founders say the problem is not the technology but management: predictability, risk and who decides what. One of our experts comes in at due-diligence stage, then either sets up the missing skills and steps away, or steps in and runs engineering for a while.
Releases slip and nobody can say why. This manager would review the backlog, the sprint cadence, the definition of done, the release process and the CI/CD gates.
A short written assessment with a prioritized list of process changes. Technical architecture questions go to a senior architect.
The team tells the founders the product must be rewritten before anything new can ship. The expert reviews what can change in place and finds the smallest path to the next feature within the current system, keeping a rewrite as a last resort with a stated cost.
The next feature's path without a rewrite, plus an honest cost of the rewrite if it's still needed.
A team keeps missing estimates and spends too much time producing them.
Switch date-bound work to fixed time and budget with flexible scope: list features as independently shippable pieces, prioritize them, make sure CD is in place, ship the most important first and keep the system working at all times.
A reworked planning process with prioritized feature slices and a check-in rhythm.
One of our experts has built several engineering teams, for their own companies and for others, including teams spread across several regions and time zones. They set up roles, hiring and delivery so the team runs without them in every decision.
— Invental · software studio · Montevideo, UY
Describe the system and the question. We match a lead expert from this page, or another of our experts if one fits better, and confirm scope before anything starts.
A link or short description of the code or system, what you want checked, your stack, and when you need the answer. No repository access is needed until scope is agreed.