Question 1

What is a fractional CTO?

Accepted Answer

A senior technical leader retained for part of a month rather than employed full time. The work is judgment rather than hands: architecture, roadmap, build versus buy, vendor assessment and hiring. It differs from an interim CTO, who is full time for a fixed stretch while you recruit, and from a part-time hire, who is an employee on set hours. Fractional suits a company with no CTO that is still making decisions worth getting right.

Question 2

What are the risks of hiring a fractional CTO?

Accepted Answer

Three real ones. Split attention, because the person has other clients, which is why the days are agreed in advance rather than left vague. Shallow context, because someone in the building two days a month knows less than someone there daily, so the decisions worth escalating have to be named explicitly. And the quiet one: a fractional CTO who becomes your only developer has stopped being a CTO and nobody notices for months.

Question 3

How do I know if someone is any good before I commit?

Accepted Answer

Ask what they would need to see before answering your hardest technical question, and be suspicious of anyone who answers it immediately. Ask what they shipped themselves in the last year. Ask for a decision they got wrong and what it cost. Then start with a paid piece of work small enough to walk away from, such as an architecture review, rather than signing a retainer on a call.

Question 4

Am I working with you, or with someone you assign?

Accepted Answer

With me. Most of this market runs on a bench: you are matched with an available person, and the one who wrote your architecture review is often not the one on the call six months later. There is no bench here. If a build follows and needs more hands, my studio provides them, and I stay the person accountable for the outcome.

Question 5

What does a fractional CTO cost in Canada?

Accepted Answer

Published Canadian ranges sit roughly between five and fifteen thousand dollars a month, against something north of three hundred thousand a year fully burdened for a full-time hire with equity. Where a specific engagement lands depends on how often you need me and whether there is a live build to oversee. It is agreed before the first month and it is month to month.

Question 6

How is this different from hiring a full-time CTO?

Accepted Answer

A full-time CTO is the right answer once technical work is continuous, the team is large enough to need daily leadership, and you want someone with equity and full commitment. Before that point you are paying a senior salary for a role that is genuinely part time, and the search alone takes months. Fractional covers the judgment without the burn while you are still finding out what you are building.

Question 7

Do you write code as well as advise?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and that is deliberate. Advice from someone who has not shipped in years drifts away from what is actually buildable. I still do architecture and the decisions that are expensive to reverse on live projects, which is what keeps the advice honest. What I do not do is quietly become your only developer.

Question 8

Will you tell me things I do not want to hear?

Accepted Answer

That is most of the value. The expensive failures I have seen were not caused by bad engineering, they were decisions nobody senior questioned early enough. If I think a vendor is wrong, a hire is premature, or a build should not happen at all, you hear it while it is still cheap to change.

Question 9

Do I have to be in New Brunswick?

Accepted Answer

No. The work is remote and clients are across Canada and the US. What the location buys you is the Atlantic time zone, which overlaps a Canadian or American working day comfortably, and the option of being in the same room when a decision deserves it.

	Fractional CTO	Interim CTO	Part-time hire	Full-time CTO
Commitment	A few days a month, ongoing	Full time, for a fixed stretch	Set hours, on payroll	Full time, permanent
Usually because	No CTO yet, but decisions that matter	Someone left and the seat is empty	The workload is steady and known	Technical work never stops
Ends when	You outgrow it	The permanent hire starts	It does not, it is a job	It does not, it is a job
Roughly costs	$5k to $15k a month	Close to a full salary	Salary, pro-rated	$300k+ a year, fully burdened

Fractional CTO Services

Advice you can hold someone to.

A fractional CTO is not a smaller CTO.

Senior judgment, without the hire.

The month it starts paying for itself.

And the month it should end.

Read, decide, then stay.

Read

Decide

Stay

Most technical decisions are cheap. A few are not.

What accountable actually means here.

The calls this exists to get right.

What founders ask before retaining anyone.

One instrument. You own it.