Do you need a CTO yet? A decision guide for founders

"Do we need a CTO?" is usually the wrong question. The useful one is: what technical decisions are we about to make, and who is qualified to make them? The answer to that tells you what kind of help you need.

#Four options, four different jobs

• A senior developer writes and ships code. Great when the product is clear and the risk is execution.
• An agency or freelancers build a defined scope. Great when you know exactly what to build and someone inside can judge the result.
• A fractional CTO owns technical strategy and the big decisions a few days a month: architecture, vendors, hiring, the roadmap. Great when the decisions are high-stakes but don't fill a full-time role yet.
• A full-time CTO does all of the above every day, and builds and leads the team. Necessary when technology is the business and the team is big enough to need daily leadership.

#Signs you need senior technical leadership now

• You're about to make a decision that's expensive to reverse: a platform rewrite, a cloud migration, a core vendor, your first engineering hires.
• Your developers or your agency are making architecture decisions by default, and nobody on the business side can tell if they're good ones.
• Delivery has slowed down and nobody can explain why in plain words.
• Investors, a big client or an auditor are starting to ask technical due-diligence questions.
• Cloud or vendor costs are growing faster than revenue.

#Signs a fractional CTO is enough

• The big decisions come in waves (a launch, a migration, a funding round), not every day.
• You have, or will soon have, someone who can execute: a lead developer, a small team or a partner.
• You can't yet justify a full executive salary, or you don't want to hire one before you know what the role really needs.

#Signs you need a full-time CTO

• Technology is your core product and differentiation, not a supporting function.
• The engineering team is big enough that it needs daily leadership, career paths and hiring at a steady pace.
• Technical decisions happen every day and waiting a few days for an answer is costly.

A good fractional engagement often ends exactly there: with the architecture in order, the team hired and the profile of the full-time CTO you need written down.

#A simple test

Write down the five most important technical decisions you'll make in the next six months. If you can't write the list, or you can't say who will make each one, you need help with technical leadership, whatever form it takes.