Overview
The startup had strong momentum, but engineering leadership was stretched thin. Decisions weren’t documented, delivery predictability was slipping, and hiring needed structure. The goal was to provide fractional CTO leadership that improved execution now while building foundations for the next phase of growth.
Starting point
Architecture choices were made in the moment, and teams lacked a shared understanding of standards. Onboarding depended on informal knowledge transfer. Roadmap commitments weren’t consistently connected to engineering capacity, which led to thrash and missed expectations.
Goals & success criteria
- Create a clear technical roadmap that matched business priorities
- Establish a consistent, lightweight architecture decision process
- Scale hiring from early-stage to a growing team with repeatable loops
- Improve onboarding and mentorship so new hires became productive quickly
- Increase delivery predictability without slowing product learning
What we did
- Decision-making cadence: introduced a lightweight weekly rhythm for architecture and roadmap tradeoffs (short, written, and actionable).
- Architecture standards: defined baseline conventions for APIs, data ownership, reliability, and operational expectations—right-sized for current constraints.
- Delivery planning: tied roadmap commitments to capacity, clarified what “done” means, and reduced context switching.
- Hiring and onboarding: built consistent interview loops, scorecards, and onboarding checklists.
- Team mentorship: paired with engineers, reviewed designs, and coached emerging tech leads to distribute leadership.
Key technical decisions
- Favor incremental architecture evolution over big rewrites
- Document decisions (ADRs) to reduce repeated debates
- Create “golden paths” for common work (services, deployments, observability)
- Align operational expectations early (on-call, incident learning, runbooks)
- Standardize onboarding and dev environment setup to reduce ramp time
Risk management
- Avoided strategy-heavy process that would slow execution
- Prioritized a small set of standards that delivered immediate leverage
- Designed rituals to be sustainable: short, written, and repeatable
- Ensured knowledge transfer so leadership wasn’t concentrated in one person
Outcomes
Over an 8‑month engagement, the engineering team scaled from 2 to 12 while maintaining clearer architecture standards and improved delivery predictability. Hiring and onboarding became repeatable, and leadership capacity was distributed across the team.
Handoff & operating model
- Hiring scorecards and interview loops
- Onboarding checklists and architecture documentation norms
- A decision-making cadence and lightweight metrics
- Coaching plans for tech leads and senior engineers
If you’re facing a similar challenge
If you need senior technical leadership without a full-time executive hire, see Fractional CTO.