MeryttA fractional tech lead or a full-time hire: how to choose.
Somebody has to own your technology. In most growing businesses that somebody is the owner, late at night. Here is how to decide who it should be instead.
At some point every growing business asks the same question. Who here owns our technology? Often the honest answer is nobody. Or it is the owner, after everyone else has gone home, after the real work is done.
The usual next thought is to hire someone. Sometimes that is right. Often a fractional tech lead fits better. Here is how to tell the difference, and what to ask before you choose either.
What is a fractional tech lead?
A fractional tech lead is a senior technical person who owns your technology part-time, for a monthly fee. They make the decisions, manage the suppliers and get things fixed. You get senior judgement without a full-time salary, and without needing enough work to fill a full-time week.
Some people call this a fractional CTO. The title matters less than the job. Someone senior is accountable for your technology, and everybody knows who it is.
When is a fractional tech lead the better choice?
When you need senior decisions more than daily hands. That is usually true for a growing business that runs on software it pays for. The work comes in bursts: choosing systems, connecting them, fixing what breaks, and dealing with suppliers. A part-time lead covers that well.
You are probably in this place if most of these are true:
- Your technology is mostly software you buy, not software you build.
- The hard part is deciding what to buy, connect or drop.
- You have suppliers, but nobody holding them to account.
- The owner is still the one who gets the call when something breaks.
When should you hire a full-time technical person instead?
Hire when the technology is the product, or when there is a full week of hands-on work every week. If you build your own software, or your systems need someone on site every day, a full-time hire makes sense. A good fractional lead can help you write that role and choose the person.
A part-time arrangement is not a cheaper version of a hire. It is a different shape of help. Be honest about which shape your work has, and choose for the next year, not the last bad week.
What are the risks of each option?
A full-time hire can leave and take what they know with them. A fractional lead can be spread too thin if they serve too many clients. Either way, the fix is the same: get the decisions written down, and keep them where the work happens, not in one person’s head.
That is also the test of anyone you bring in. A few months later, is more of your technology understood by more of your people, or less? If the answer is less, you have swapped one bottleneck for another.
Whoever owns your technology, the business should know more because of them, not depend on them more.
What should you ask before choosing either?
Ask what decisions you need made in the next year, who makes them now, and what it costs you when nobody does. Then ask every candidate, full-time or fractional, how they would leave things if they walked away tomorrow. The best answer is a written one.
Four questions to put to anyone you are thinking of bringing in:
- What do you think is in the way right now, in plain words?
- Is that a decision problem or a capacity problem?
- Who on our side will you work with each week?
- What will be written down that is not written down today?
Where Merytt fits.
We are the AI and Technology Transformation Partner for growing businesses, and part of that job is acting as your fractional tech lead. It starts with your Roadmap: a written plan of what is wrong and what to build, with its price. Then we build the fix (from €12,000), and we keep it running on the monthly, from €3,000 a month. Both are priced in your Roadmap.
If the honest answer is that you need a full-time hire, your Roadmap will say so.
Questions
Is a fractional tech lead the same as a fractional CTO?
Mostly, yes. Both mean a senior technical person who owns your technology part-time. The title matters less than the job: someone senior is accountable, and you know who it is.
How much does a fractional tech lead cost?
It depends on the firm and how much they do. At Merytt it is part of the monthly. It starts with your Roadmap (from €3,500), then the build your Roadmap names (from €12,000), then the monthly, from €3,000 a month, which starts when the build kicks off. All three are for a business of 10 to 50 staff and priced in your Roadmap.