Services

Fractional CTO for founders, SMEs, and scale-ups

Senior technology leadership without the cost or commitment of a permanent CTO.

Unlike purely advisory CTOs, Provolve can also design, build, deploy, and hand over production systems where hands-on delivery is required.

Good-fit situations

  • You need a technical strategy before hiring a team.
  • Your current platform is slowing down delivery.
  • You are unsure whether to rebuild, refactor, or replace.
  • Developers, agencies, or vendors need stronger technical oversight.
  • Investors, partners, or customers are asking hard technical questions.
  • You need someone who can speak to both the board and the engineers.
  • You need practical leadership from someone who still understands the code.

What the engagement can include

  • CTO advisory
  • Architecture and platform review
  • Engineering roadmap
  • Product technical strategy
  • Supplier and vendor management
  • Hiring and team structure
  • Delivery planning
  • Technical due diligence
  • Security and compliance review
  • Hands-on prototyping or development where needed

Output examples

Technical roadmap

Architecture review

Delivery risk report

Build vs buy recommendation

Hiring plan

Supplier / agency assessment

Platform rescue plan

Investor or board-level technical narrative

Product and platform specification

System design and architecture diagrams

Website, app, or internal tool design

Prototype or MVP build

Production-ready software implementation

Deployment and release strategy

Cloud / infrastructure architecture

CI/CD and environment setup

Data migration plan

Integration plan

Security and compliance review

Technical due diligence report

Operational handover documentation

Fractional CTO questions, answered plainly

What does a fractional CTO actually do?

Sets the technical direction, owns the architecture decisions, oversees developers, agencies, and vendors, makes the build, buy, or rebuild calls, and translates all of it for the board. At Provolve it also includes hands-on delivery, so decisions are tested against working code rather than assumptions.

How is a fractional CTO different from a consultant?

A consultant produces a report and leaves you to act on it. A fractional CTO stays accountable for the outcome, sits in your management conversations, and is still there when the plan meets reality and needs changing.

How much time does an engagement take?

Typically one to three days a week while delivery is active, dropping to a lighter oversight pattern once systems are stable and the team can carry the work. The shape is set by what the business needs rather than by a fixed retainer.

When should we hire a permanent CTO instead?

When engineering is large enough and permanent enough to need someone in the building every day, usually once the team is beyond roughly fifteen engineers with a multi-year roadmap. A fractional CTO covers the period before that and can run the hiring process for the permanent role.

Do you write code, or only advise?

Both. Architecture, prototypes, integrations, and production systems are all delivered hands on. That is the difference between a purely advisory CTO and one who can prove the recommendation by building it. See what has been delivered.

What would an engineer find if they spent a week inside your operation?

Book a short call to talk through where the work is getting stuck, what your systems are costing you, and whether a deployment is the right answer. If it is not, you will be told that.