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Fractional Leadership
Senior judgment, embedded in your team.
Embedded product and engineering leadership for companies that need a senior operator in the room — running the org, the architecture and the hiring — without carrying a full-time executive.
Format
Embedded · hours flex to you
Commitment
Month to month
Notice
30 days, both ways
From
From $5,000 / month
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Who this is for
A $300k salary and a twelve-month search, for a decision you need made this quarter.
The full-time CTO hire is the most expensive bet an early company makes, and the one it is least equipped to judge. You are hiring for judgment you don’t yet have, from a pool you can’t yet assess, on a salary that assumes you were right.
You probably need this if
- Engineering ships, but never quite when they said they would.
- You’re the technical decision-maker by default, and it’s eating the job you should be doing.
- You have good engineers and no one senior enough to tell them no.
- Investors are asking technical questions you can’t answer with confidence.
- You’ve been interviewing CTOs for months and every candidate is either too junior or too expensive.
- Something is structurally wrong and everyone can feel it, but no one can name it.
What I’ve run before
Product and engineering globally at Aspire across India and North America — hiring and leading PMs, engineers and designers against enterprise timelines while the organisation scaled underneath me.
Before that, building CommerceUp’s engineering org from the first hire to a platform serving 70+ merchants across the UAE and MENA. Both the founder version of the job and the inside-a-larger-company version.
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The first ninety days
Listen. Diagnose. Fix the loop. Then build.
The order matters. Almost every failed technical leadership hire I have watched went wrong by reorganising in week one, on a diagnosis they hadn’t earned yet.
Week one
Listen before changing anything
One-to-ones with every engineer, PM and designer. Read the codebase, the backlog, the incident history and the last two quarters of what shipped versus what was promised. I change nothing in week one — teams that have been reorganised by a newcomer on day three stop telling that person the truth.
Week two
The honest assessment
A written read of where you actually are: what's structurally sound, what's held together by one person, what's going to break at the next order of magnitude, and which of your problems are engineering problems versus product or organisational ones wearing an engineering costume.
Weeks three to six
Fix the delivery loop first
Before architecture, before hiring: how work gets from decided to shipped. Planning cadence, definition of done, review and release process, on-call. Most teams that feel slow aren't short of engineers — they're short of a working loop, and that's the cheapest thing on the list to fix.
Ongoing
Run it, and hire your replacement
Architecture decisions, roadmap, performance and leveling, vendor calls, board and investor technical conversations. In parallel I'm building toward not being needed — documenting decisions, growing your senior people, and when the time comes, running the search for the full-time leader and handing over properly.
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Scope
What I own, and what stays yours.
What this is
- Engineering and product leadership, day to day
- Architecture and technical decisions
- Delivery cadence, planning and release process
- Hiring: scorecards, interviewing, leveling and offers
- One-to-ones, performance and team structure
- Board and investor technical conversations
- Vendor and platform selection
- Hiring and handing over to your permanent leader
What this isn’t
- Writing the bulk of the code — you have engineers for that
- A guarantee I'll be your CTO forever. The goal is handover
- Signing off on a plan I think is wrong to keep the peace
- Replacing a functioning leader you're avoiding a conversation with
- Legal, finance or HR ownership outside the engineering org
- Twelve-month lock-ins
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Questions
The things people ask first.
Both flex to you — that is the point of working remotely, and it is set by what the engagement actually needs rather than a fixed block. Dedicated or fractional work gets committed hours aligned to your team's day, wherever that is; lighter engagements run on scheduled calls and slots you request. The first month of an engagement usually runs hotter than the sixth. What matters more than a day count is being reachable when a decision can't wait, and your team treating me as their leader rather than a visiting consultant.
Running it. That's the distinction between this and Advisory. I hold one-to-ones, make the architecture calls, own the delivery commitments, sit in your leadership meetings and answer for engineering outcomes. If you want someone to opine from outside the org, Advisory is cheaper and more honest about what it is.
At pre-seed and seed, usually yes — and often better than a first-time CTO hire, because you get judgment that's already been tested. Past Series A the calculus changes: the job becomes more about the organisation than the technology, and that wants someone full-time. At that point my job is to help you hire them and hand over cleanly.
Usually they get better, quickly. Most first-time engineering leads have never had a senior person to think out loud with — that's the gap I fill. If the best outcome of an engagement is that your existing lead is ready for the job and I leave, that's a success, not a failure. It's what I'm aiming at.
Only if you want them. Fractional Leadership is about leading the team you have. If we conclude you need more hands, I can bring senior people from my network or we hire them permanently — but I won't quietly convert a leadership engagement into a staffing contract.
Because you're committing and I'm reserving capacity. $200/hour is for ad-hoc advisory with no commitment on either side — you pay a premium for the flexibility of using me only when you want to. A monthly engagement is the opposite trade: you hold a slot, I hold time for you, and the rate reflects that. It is also an introductory rate while I build the first references for this practice, so it will not stay here.
I work remotely from India with clients across the US, UK, Singapore, Australia, Canada and the UAE — the commerce platform I built and sold served the UAE and MENA, and I ran product and engineering across India and North America at Aspire, so distributed delivery across time zones is the normal case for me rather than the exception. Contracting and invoicing are handled to suit your entity: USD invoicing for international clients, GST-compliant invoicing where an Indian entity is required. Tell me your setup on the first call and I'll tell you exactly how it works.
Month to month with a real notice period, both ways. No twelve-month lock-in — if it isn't working you shouldn't need a lawyer to leave, and if I'm not adding value I'd rather you spent the money elsewhere. Every engagement is aimed at a defined handover rather than an indefinite retainer.
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Other ways to work together
If embedded leadership is more than you need.
2 embedded engagements at a time — building Convertly with the rest
Tell me what your engineering org feels like from the inside.
Thirty minutes. I'll tell you honestly whether you need a fractional leader, a full-time hire, or just a better delivery loop.