I come in when the engineering team is stuck. Too much debt, too many features, not enough decisions.
I decide. I structure. I leave when it’s done.
What I bring
Decisions, not code. The call between rebuild and stabilise. A diagnosis in 72 hours. A roadmap in 30 days. Unblocking a team going in circles.
What I don’t do
Development. Hiring. Feel-good coaching. Audits with no follow-through. Slide decks with no implementation.
If you need someone to build your features, hire a freelancer. If you need someone to decide which ones to build, we should talk.
The 72-hour diagnosis
Three days, before any long commitment.
Day 1 — the people. Five thirty-minute conversations: founder, CTO, lead, product, one junior developer. The same question to each. Where the answers diverge is the first diagnosis — the wider the divergence, the more the problem is organisational rather than technical.
Day 2 — the loops. Time between a push and feedback. How incidents are handled, not how many. A post-mortem that produces no change is a document, not a lesson.
Day 3 — the decisions. Who decides what, how, and how fast. If nobody can answer immediately, governance comes before technology.
The output is three pages. The three problems that, once solved, unblock the rest.
Three questions I ask before accepting
Are you ready to change? Not “do you have a problem” — everyone has a problem. Have you tried to solve it yourself, is the budget approved, and do you know who carries the decisions after I leave?
Is there a single decision-maker? The worst context is a committee. If every call takes three weeks, the engagement fails before it starts.
Can you afford to act on the recommendations? Otherwise they stay in a document. Budget roughly three times the cost of the engagement itself.
I currently accept around 40% of the engagements offered. That is what keeps the success rate honest.
Rate
€1,500 per day. Most engagements: three to six months, one to two days a week.
I publish it because a position built on transparency that hides its price contradicts itself. And because it saves us a call if we are not on the same scale.
At that rate a fractional CTO costs less than a junior hire on a decision-shaped problem — and more, as soon as you go past two or three days a week over a year. At that point you don’t need a fractional. You need a CTO. I say that too.
Talk
Thirty minutes, no commitment. You describe the situation, I tell you whether it’s my job or not — and if it isn’t, where to look instead.