CTO advisory
Senior technical leadership on demand for founders and boards without one in-house.
- Engagement
- Monthly retainer, a fixed number of days each month
- Typical timeline
- Rolling, three-month minimum
- Starts with
- A ninety-minute call about the decision currently keeping you awake.
You are the founder, you are not an engineer, and this week you have to pick a hosting vendor, judge whether a contractor is any good, and decide whether a slipping roadmap is normal. Everyone available to ask has something to sell you.
Experienced judgement on the calls that are expensive to get wrong.
What we build
Concrete artefacts, handed over and documented.
- 01
A weekly hour with you, with the decisions written down afterwards so they can be revisited rather than re-argued
- 02
Engineering standards the team signs up to: how code is reviewed, how work is estimated, what done means
- 03
Hiring support, scorecards, an interview loop, and a technical panel we sit on ourselves
- 04
Vendor and contract review before you sign, including the exit terms most people skim
- 05
A monthly written note to you or the board: what shipped, what slipped, what it cost, what worries us
What changes
Technical decisions get a second opinion from someone with nothing to sell you
Engineering hires are judged against a written bar instead of against a good conversation
You can tell the board what is happening in engineering in your own words
How it runs
01Get current
The team, the system, the roadmap and the contracts, all reviewed before we offer a single opinion.
02First quarter
A weekly session, interview panels as they come up, and standards introduced one at a time rather than dropped as a document.
03Steady cadence
The written note, the vendor and hiring decisions of that month, and a quarterly check on whether you still need us.
Chosen per project. Named here so you can see the shape of it.
- Notion
- GitHub
- Linear
- Google Meet
Questions we get asked
Related work
Tell us the outcome, not the tooling.
Send us the situation you are in. We will tell you which discipline it belongs to, what we would do first and what it costs, including when the answer is to wait.