fractional cto · chief product
Fractional, hands-on. Working with SaaS teams from first hire to around 40 people. Typically six to twelve months.
The bottleneck is rarely the technical team. Decision making and key knowledge is often concentrated in a few key people. I take the CTO or Chief Product seat and put in the product and engineering systems that take those decisions off those people. The flywheel turns faster because it no longer waits for one person.
It starts with an idea, about how you can improve the product you offer.
Before handing over the idea to development, think the problem through. Writing is a very effective way to think things through. Do this exercise with multiple disciplines involved.
When the problem is clear, create a low-fidelity mockup of what you're going to build. Low-fidelity means quick and dirty, but also cheap to throw away. (Which will happen a lot.)
Use your low-fidelity prototype to learn more about the problem and the potential solution.
Based on user feedback, update your problem statement and solution direction.
When it's clear what to build and the amount of work that is involved, prioritize the features that will have the biggest impact on the business.
The actual implementation of your change, done by the development team.
Roll out to your actual users. Involves more than just deploying the code, but also marketing, sales, and customer support.
Placeholder for Product analytics — a sentence or two on how usage data feeds the next idea without waiting for the human loop.
Placeholder for Feedback — a sentence or two on what happens here, who owns it, and what it produces.
You already run a business and you have an idea for a digital product. Before you hire anyone to build and scale it, I help you validate the idea with a actual working product.
Before anything is built. Typical work here is problem interviews, sitting with people while they do the job, mapping how the work happens today, and writing down who feels the pain, how often, and what it costs. Until that is specific, there is nothing to ship.
When the problem is clear, you have to test whether your solution actually solves their problem. Typically you do this with prototypes that are easy to throw away.
This phase is about finding out whether you the problem you have found at your initial customers, is also a problem for the larger market. You'll need to tweak your processes and your product before you can scale.
Hiring, structuring the processes, and finding more channels. Typical once the company already works. To make sure you can capture your market.
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I run Count Code, a one-person practice in 's-Hertogenbosch, NL. I take fractional CTO and chief product seats, positions where you need someone to discuss strategy whilst still being able to open a pull request.
It is not an agency. I typically take on two companies at a time, for a duration of six to twelve months.
Three sentences. What are you building, what's stuck, and where do you need help?