Three engineers, no leadership, always firefighting
A capable small team shipping constantly in the wrong direction, with founder attention as the only architecture.
- Unplanned work
- 28%6%-22pp
- Engineers
- 37+4
- Incidents
- 91.4-84%
Month six against month zero. Source: Linear and Sentry, November 2024
Context
A media startup with three engineers, no technical leadership, and a founder who was also the product manager, the architect and the on call rota.
The constraint
The thing that ruled out the obvious answer.
The company could not yet justify a full time CTO salary, and hiring one at the wrong level would have been worse than hiring nobody. The engagement had to end with a permanent hire, not extend indefinitely.
Diagnosis
The team was not underperforming. It was being interrupted. Over a quarter of every sprint was unplanned work, most of it caused by the absence of a deployment process rather than by the complexity of the product.
What we rejected, and what we chose instead
Any firm can describe what it built. The useful record is the option that was on the table and did not survive.
Rejected
Recruit a full time CTO immediately
At that stage the role was undefined, so the search would have optimised for the wrong seniority. Six months of operating the function first produced a brief that described the actual job.
Chosen
Fractional CTO, three days a week, with a hand over built into the scope
Enough presence to hold the function and change the process, with the explicit deliverable of recruiting and transitioning to a permanent hire.
What was actually implemented
- 01CI, staging and a deployment process in the first three weeks
- 02On call rota with an escalation path, replacing founder as first responder
- 03Architecture decision records so choices stopped living in one person's head
- 04Hiring brief written from six months of observed need, then four engineers recruited
- 05Permanent head of engineering hired and transitioned in the final eight weeks
Measured, not estimated
Unplanned sprint work fell from 28% to 6% and production incidents from 9 a month to 1.4. The team grew to seven and the permanent hire took over on schedule.
Month six against month zero. Source: Linear and Sentry, November 2024
The operating model outlived the engagement.
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Leadership and assurance
Fractional leadership, managed platform teams and compliance readiness for organisations that need the seniority before they can justify the salary.