Senior leadership, without the full-time hire
A part-time CTO, Architect, Product Manager, project or iteration manager, or Operations Manager who joins your team for the days you need, and grows or steps back as you do.
Roles
Part of your team, part of the week
Have one specific problem with a clear finish line instead? See Engagements.
CTO
For businesses whose technology decisions now matter, but who are not ready for a full-time CTO.
Just need help hiring? →- ✓Technology strategy and roadmap the board can follow
- ✓Architecture, security and vendor decisions
- ✓Hiring and leading your engineers, or your first one
- ✓A senior voice in the room with investors and partners
Or just the part you need
Architect
For businesses whose systems need to grow, stay secure or be rebuilt, with no one senior to design them.
- ✓A review of whether your systems will cope as you grow
- ✓A target architecture and a plan to get there
- ✓Security designed in, not bolted on
- ✓Designs your developers and vendors can build against
Product Manager
For businesses building a product who need someone to decide what is worth building, and why.
- ✓Customer and market insight behind every decision
- ✓A product vision and roadmap tied to business goals
- ✓Clear priorities the team can build against
- ✓Measures that show whether the product is working
Technical Project Manager
For businesses with an important technology project and no one to own delivery.
- ✓A plan, a budget and a date that people believe
- ✓Vendors, contractors and staff working to the same plan
- ✓Risks raised early, in plain English
- ✓Regular, honest status reporting
Iteration Manager
For teams that run in sprints and want each one set up to succeed, without a full-time Scrum Master.
- ✓Joins at sprint time: planning, review and retro
- ✓Reviews the backlog, stories and other sprint artifacts
- ✓Clear goals, sensible scope and blockers removed early
- ✓A team that learns and improves sprint on sprint
Operations Manager
For growing businesses where processes, tools and people have outgrown how things were set up.
- ✓Processes that are written down and actually followed
- ✓Tools and systems that fit how the team works
- ✓Fewer manual handoffs and less time lost
- ✓Reporting that shows how the business is running
A role is a starting point, not a boundary
We’ve spent years working in small businesses, and we know a job title rarely says exactly what you’ll do, where your job stops or what you own. So every fractional role we take on has room to stretch. We focus on what the business needs, and adapt as that changes.
The arrangement
How our fractional roles work
Senior leadership, part-time, for a fixed period.
- Set hours, for a set term
- We agree a number of hours a week for a fixed term, such as 16 hours (two days) a week for three months. Within that, the time goes wherever it’s most useful to you.
- Flexible when it matters
- The hours are a guide, not a limit. If something urgent comes up on a day we’re not scheduled, or after the week’s hours are used, call us. We’ll make time, so you’re never left waiting on an email. We know what it takes to run a business, and we’re here to help yours succeed.
- Building your team’s capability
- We teach your team to fish rather than fishing for them. A fractional role is temporary by design: by the end, your team should be confident running things themselves, or we’ll help you find and set up the right long-term structure.
- Still here when you need us
- When the arrangement ends, you can still call on us for one-off advice.
How it works
Flexible by design
- 1
Intro call
Talk through where the business is and what is missing.
- 2
Agree the shape
Agree the role, the days per week and what success looks like.
- 3
Embed
Work inside your team, in your tools and meetings.
- 4
Review
Check in regularly. Scale up, down, or hand over to a permanent hire.
Why work with us
Leadership you can trust
- ☆
20+ years of experience
Across startups, scale-ups and enterprise, including CTO roles reporting to boards.
- ◎
End-to-end perspective
Strategy, architecture, security, data and day-to-day operations.
- ◈
Independent advice
Unbiased and focused on what is best for your business, not on selling you more.
- ♧
Plain English
We explain as we go, so you never depend on us to understand your own business.
Track Record
Led by an engineering leader, not a salesperson
Advice comes from a CTO and engineering leader with 20+ years across online marketplaces, health and wealth services, fintech and AI-driven customer analytics, working across AWS and Azure.
- Cost & efficiency
- Cut cloud spend by 21%, 36% and over 80% across three organisations, and moved on-premise systems to AWS.
- Security & compliance
- Led SOC2 (independently audited), ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR programs, plus incident, disaster recovery and penetration testing routines.
- Architecture & data
- Monolith to distributed architecture, event-driven processing and data lakes handling terabytes of data.
- Teams & delivery
- Agile at scale, CI/CD and secure development practices, and global teams reporting to boards and executives.
Speaking
- 2023
Tech Decisions that Improve your Business
Evolution Exchange Australia
- 2019
The Future of DevOps
DevOps Summit VIC
- 2017
How an Enterprise Business can Sprint like a Start-up
AWS Sydney Summit
- 2017
Implementing Agile in an Enterprise
LAST Conference
Not sure which role you need?
Tell us where the business is and what keeps getting stuck. We'll suggest the right shape, even if that is a single engagement or a full-time hire.
Book an Intro Call →