Frequently asked questions
- What deliverables should I expect by day 30?
- A current-state doc, ranked risk list, signed 12-week engineering plan, and at least one shipped improvement with a standing weekly review.
- Does a Fractional CTO replace my engineering manager?
- No—they complement leadership by setting direction, unblocking architecture, and raising hiring bar while your team executes day to day.
- How is APLINDO's Fractional CTO different from a consultant?
- We embed in your rituals—Slack, incidents, hiring panels—and stay accountable to shipped outcomes, not slide decks.
Founders often ask what a Fractional CTO actually does — beyond the LinkedIn description. Here's the playbook we run on day one of every engagement, week by week.
Week 1: What happens in listen-and-read mode?
- 1:1 with each engineer (and the founders again)
- Read every README, run book, and recent post-mortem
- Run the product as a real user would
- Skim the last 30 days of Slack engineering channels
- Output: a "current state" doc that anyone can read
Week 2: How do we diagnose technical risk?
- Architecture walkthrough with the senior engineers
- Look at the on-call experience: incidents, alerts, fatigue
- Pull metrics: deploy frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR
- Output: the top three risks ranked by impact and effort
Week 3: How do founders and engineering align?
- Workshop with the founders on roadmap vs. risk
- Decide what the next 12 weeks of engineering work look like
- Rewrite the engineering JD if hiring is on the table
- Output: a 12-week plan signed off by founders and senior engineers
Week 4: What does execution look like?
- Pair with engineers on the highest-leverage architecture work
- Run the first hiring panel
- Standing weekly engineering review goes live
- Output: shipped progress and momentum
Key takeaways
- Visible artefacts by week 4—not vague "advisory" hours.
- Risks ranked by impact and effort so founders can fund the right bets.
- A standing weekly review that survives after the first month.
If your Fractional CTO isn't producing artefacts you can read by week 4, something is off. The role is judgment under uncertainty, but the output should be visible.