Fractional
Technology direction, without a permanent hire.
Digital and technology direction, including AI priorities, without a permanent hire.
- 1–2 days per week · 6–12 months
- Monthly strategic reviews · handover built in
What prompts the call
- The organisation needs technology direction and cannot yet justify a permanent CTO or digital director. The decisions are consequential but they arrive monthly, not hourly.
- You are between permanent hires and do not want to freeze every platform and vendor decision for the length of a search.
- The leadership team sets strategy with no technologist in the room, and finds out what it costs afterwards.
- There is pressure to hold a position on AI, and nobody internally placed to separate what is useful from what is being sold to you.
How it runs
Leadership of the function for the duration of the engagement, with a planned handover.
Rhythm
One to two days a week, fixed
On a predictable cadence rather than on call. At this volume predictability matters more than hours — the organisation needs to know when a decision can be taken, not whether somebody will pick up the phone.
Monthly
Strategic review
The spine of the engagement: priorities, spend, risks, and what changed. Decisions recorded, so the next one is not relitigated from the beginning.
Between
The live questions
Vendor conversations, architecture decisions, hiring, roadmap. Part of the seat is being in the room when business strategy is set rather than receiving it afterwards — technology decisions taken downstream of a strategy nobody explained are the expensive kind.
Exit
Toward the permanent hire
For most organisations the intended end state is a permanent leader. Shaping that role, sitting on the panel and onboarding the person who takes it is part of the work, not an exit from it.
What you get
On the table.
- A technology and digital roadmap the leadership team has genuinely agreed, not merely seen.
- Monthly strategic reviews, with decisions recorded.
- A position on AI: where it earns its cost, where it does not, and what governance must exist before it scales.
- Vendor evaluation and selection, with the comparison written down.
- Input to technology hiring — role shape, assessment and panel.
- The technology team led for the duration — priorities, cadence and the difficult conversations — not advised from beside it.
- A handover to the permanent hire, or a documented state if that timing slips.
What I need from you.
- A seat at the leadership table, not a reporting line into it.
- One to two days a week held consistently, rather than borrowed when something breaks.
- Clarity on what this role decides and what it advises. The two fail in different ways.
- Access to whoever currently holds technology decisions, whether or not that is their job title.
When this is the wrong call
- You need somebody accountable for one programme’s delivery. That is interim programme leadership, at a higher cadence.
- The requirement is hands-on engineering. This is a leadership seat; the code belongs to someone else.
- A one-off assessment would answer the question. Fixed-scope work is a better fit and considerably cheaper.
- There is already a CTO and the real problem is that they are not listened to. A second voice does not fix that.
Questions
- Do you do hands-on engineering?
- Not as the engagement. I build with these tools weekly and review architecture decisions properly rather than nodding at them, but the delivery work belongs to your team or to an implementation partner.
- How many organisations do you hold at once?
- Two or three, deliberately. Fractional leadership stops working the moment it becomes a queue, and the cadence only holds if the number stays small.
- Are you tied to any vendor or platform?
- No. There is no reseller margin and no referral fee anywhere in this practice, which is the only reason the recommendation is worth anything. Where a recommendation favours a supplier, the reasoning goes on the table with it.