Fractional CTO: tech leadership & agile teams

A fractional CTO is an experienced technology leader who fills the Chief Technology Officer role part-time – typically one to two days per week, without a full-time salary. They own the technology roadmap and architecture decisions, build development teams, introduce agile processes such as Scrum or Kanban and steer external vendors. For investors and due diligence, they are the technical point of contact. It fits when technical leadership is needed but a permanent hire is not. They often stay for several months until an internal successor is in place.

This matters for mid-sized companies and corporate divisions now because AI, cloud and software demand strategic decisions that stall without technical leadership or get left to vendors. Typical problems: the development team delivers unpredictably, agility exists only as ritual, and external partners work without clear steering. Technology decisions are made on preference rather than economics. The consequences are projects that blow budget and schedule, and a dependency on vendors that nobody in-house can control any more. With AI initiatives, nobody then weighs benefit, risk and architecture together.

I am founder and CEO of mysoftwarelab GmbH, have spent more than 20 years in enterprise IT for DAX-listed corporations and have delivered more than 50 projects with distributed teams. Unlike a pure agile coach, I build myself: I have developed more than 15 SaaS products of my own, seven of which are live. I start with a two-week assessment of team, code and processes, then remove the biggest blockers and set up roles, rituals and KPIs. I can also build a successor or stay long-term.