Senior product and technology leadership, for as many days as you need.

A managing director spends Tuesday afternoon on a call with the development agency, listening to an explanation of why the next release needs another six weeks. They suspect it doesn’t, but they can’t say why, and the person who could is a senior hire the business can’t justify yet.

Most growing companies reach this point. Technology decisions start to carry real money, but the business isn’t ready for a full-time CTO or Chief Product Officer. So the decisions get made by whoever is closest: the agency, a senior developer who has never managed a budget, or the managing director late at night. Each of them is doing their best, and each is missing either the independence or the experience the decision needs.

The two roles cover different ground. A CPO decides what to build and for whom, owns the roadmap and checks whether each release did what it was meant to. A CTO decides how it gets built: the architecture, the suppliers, security and the engineering team. A small company usually needs both, and usually from the same person.

We step into that role for a set number of days each month, as part of your leadership team. In practice that means owning the product roadmap, sitting in on supplier calls and challenging estimates, reviewing architecture and code quality, writing job specifications and interviewing engineers, preparing the technology side of investor conversations and due diligence, and explaining all of it to the board in plain language.

The work is led by IOTEQ’s founder, Craig Lax, who has spent around 30 years building production systems, including founding and running technology start-ups, and owning global product lines worth more than $10 million.

A fractional role isn’t meant to last forever. If technology becomes the core of your business, you’ll need a full-time leader, and part of our job is helping you hire that person and handing over cleanly when they arrive.

Until then, the next time the agency says six weeks, someone on your side of the table will know whether that’s right.