Fractional Technology & Product Advisor

The problem this solves

Past a certain size, the expensive decisions stop being engineering decisions. Should we rebuild or refactor? Do we hire a QA lead or redesign the pipeline? Is this AI feature ready for customers, or only ready for a demo? Which of these twelve roadmap items actually unblocks enterprise?

Those calls usually land on a founder or a CTO who is already at capacity, and they get made on instinct, under time pressure, with nobody senior enough in the room to disagree. The cost shows up two quarters later as rework, churn or a failed enterprise deal.

This engagement puts an experienced, independent second brain in that room every week.

What is in scope

• Weekly founder/CTO/CPO advisory session. A standing 90 minutes on whatever is live — not a status update.
• Architecture and design reviews for high-impact initiatives before the build starts.
• Product and roadmap decision reviews — sequencing, trade-offs, and what to stop doing.
• Quality and release-risk reviews — where the pipeline will fail under the next 3× of load or team size.
• AI feature readiness, evaluation and guardrail reviews for teams shipping model-backed features.
• Technical hiring and senior engineering interview support — role design, scorecards, and sitting in on final panels.
• Technical debt and risk prioritisation — a ranked list tied to commercial consequence, not developer preference.
• Board and investor technical preparation where relevant.
• Asynchronous access for defined high-impact decisions between sessions.

What is explicitly out of scope

Naming the boundaries is how this stays valuable for both sides.

• Not staff augmentation
• Not outsourced QA
• Not an unlimited engineering help desk
• Not a substitute for your CTO or VP Engineering where one already exists

Hands-on implementation can be scoped separately as a project, or built with Aarohii. Keeping advice and delivery in separate commercial envelopes is deliberate: it means my recommendation is never a quote in disguise.

How the first 30 days run

Week 1 — Orientation. I read the system, not the deck: repo structure, CI history, incident log, roadmap, org chart, and the last two quarters of decisions. I sit in on one real planning session and one real deploy.

Week 2 — Constraint map. A written view of where product, engineering and quality decisions are actually made, where they break down, and the three constraints costing you the most. This is the document that usually reframes the conversation.

Weeks 3–4 — First decisions. We work the live queue: the decisions already waiting, ranked by cost of getting them wrong. By the end of month one you should have made at least two calls you had been deferring.

Ongoing. Weekly session, reviews on request, async access for defined decisions, and a quarterly written reassessment of whether the engagement still earns its fee.

Who this fits

Founder-led B2B SaaS and AI companies, typically Series A–C or growth stage, with roughly 20–200 engineers and meaningful engineering complexity. The usual trigger is one of: release friction, technical debt that has become a commercial problem, AI integration risk, roadmap prioritisation that keeps reversing, enterprise-readiness pressure, or simply the need for independent technical judgment that does not report to anyone internally.

Who this does not fit: pre-product teams still searching for fit, companies that want a vendor to agree with a decision already made, and organisations where the person in the room cannot act on the conclusion.

Commercial structure

Four to six days a month, agreed before we start — roughly a day a week. The weekly session is 90 minutes of that; the rest goes on reading an architecture proposal properly rather than reacting to a summary of it, sitting in on a hiring panel, or working a release-risk review. Teams mid-migration or shipping to a deadline sit at the upper end.

A fixed monthly fee — no hourly billing and no scope-creep invoices. The fee follows the cadence, not the number of questions you ask, so nobody has to ration them.

Indicative ranges appear when you pick an engagement on the fit form. The actual number is quoted on the fit call, once I understand the size of the system and the decision load — a published figure would be wrong for too many contexts to be useful on its own.

Engagements run on a three-month initial term and continue monthly after that. I work with three clients at a time, maximum, which is the constraint that keeps the cadence real.

Common questions

We already have a CTO. Does this conflict? No — most engagements are strongest when there is a CTO. I am the person they get to think out loud with, and the second opinion the board trusts because I am not competing for anything internally.

How is this different from a project? A project has a defined scope and an end. A retainer is ongoing judgment across whatever arrives. More on choosing between them in retainer vs project.

What if we need hands-on delivery? Scoped separately — either as a fixed-scope engagement with me, or as a build with Aarohii. It is never bundled into the retainer.

What happens when it stops being useful? I tell you. The quarterly reassessment exists so that conversation has a scheduled home rather than dragging on.