A CTO's Judgement, On Your Budget
Senior architecture, team leadership and delivery management, without the full-time cost.
- Architecture & technical strategy
- Engineering team leadership
- Project & program management
- Technical due diligence & scoping
A CTO's judgement, without the CTO's salary
Somewhere between "founder with an idea" and "company with an engineering org" sits a long stretch where you need senior technical judgement a few days a month, not a £150k hire. That's the gap we fill. T&M's principal has spent 10+ years as architect, program manager and CTO across AI systems, fintech and healthcare, holds an MSc in computer science, and publishes AI research. The combination matters: academic rigor for evaluating what's real, delivery scars for knowing what ships.
A fractional CTO engagement means someone in your corner who has scoped, hired, fired, rescued and shipped before, and who has no incentive to overbuild, because we're not billing you by the engineer.
What the engagement covers
The first month is an honest technical audit: architecture, codebase, team, vendor contracts, and the roadmap's relationship with reality. You get a written assessment with priorities, including the things that are fine and should be left alone, which consultants rarely say.
Ongoing, the role flexes to what the month needs: architecture decisions, hiring and vetting engineers, vendor and agency oversight (we're unusually good at catching what outsourced teams hide, having run those teams), investor-facing technical material, and delivery management with real program-management discipline: written scopes, staged milestones, kickoff checklists. It's a retainer measured in days per month, sized to your stage, and it scales down as your own team scales up. A fractional CTO who tries to become permanent is doing it wrong.
A warning about this market
"Fractional CTO" has become a title people award themselves between jobs. Two filters separate the real ones: have they carried a product from scoping to production recently, with the AI-era toolchain rather than 2015's; and will they show you written artifacts, audits, scopes, decision docs, rather than talk in frameworks. We pass both and will happily be tested on either. The third filter is yours to apply: a good fractional CTO should sometimes tell you to spend less.
Straight answers
How is this different from hiring an agency?
Opposite incentives. An agency profits when you build more. A fractional CTO on a flat retainer profits when you build the right things, including telling you what not to build, which we do often.
How many days a month do we get?
Typically two to six, set quarterly. Months ship-heavy in delivery get more; quiet months get strategy and review.
Can you manage our existing developers or outsourced team?
Yes. This is the most common engagement shape. We set the process (scoped tickets, review gates, staging discipline) and hold the team to it.
Do you also build, or only advise?
Both, deliberately. Advice from people who no longer build goes stale fast, especially in AI. When hands-on work is needed, it's scoped separately so the retainer stays honest.
What if we outgrow you?
Then we've succeeded. Part of the role is hiring your full-time technical lead and handing over cleanly: documented decisions, no hostage-taking.