Do You Need a CTO or VP Engineering?
You have an idea for a startup or you want to adopt a new technology platform. Or perhaps you want to ensure that your technologies, practices, and capabilities scale with your technology business.
The right technical expertise can enhance your chance of success by reducing your risks, accelerating your time to market, and reducing your cost in the long run. But you might not need a full-time CTO or VP Engineering at this point, or you might not be ready to incur the time and money expense or to enter into a long-term commitment of employing one.
CTO-as-a-Service can help you jump-start your business by sidestepping upfront expenses and efforts.
What is CTO-as-a-Service?
CTO-as-a-Service works for technical management expertise the same way that cloud services like AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure works for computing infrastructure and resources.
By eliminating upfront commitment and costs, you get quick and affordable access to deep expertise and experience in technology, people, practices, and management.
Engagement Models
As a contract based service, a CTO-as-a-Service could be
- Part-time — instead of paying the full time cost of an experienced executive, the CTO-as-a-Service engagement could be project-based or suitably sized flexible part-time retainer.
- Interim — a CTO-as-a-Service can take the urgency out of recruiting a long-term CTO and increase the chances of selecting a truly appropriate talent for the role.
- Complementing — a CTO-as-a-Service can complement a CTO by filling in as a deputy in areas that require additional attention or to accelerate capability acquisition.
- Mentoring — a CTO-as-a-Service can serve to mentor an existing senior technical manager or a junior CTO to grow into the CTO role.
- Advisory — a CTO-as-a-Service can offer advice or a second opinion on architecture, organization, people, and processes.
Services Available
Product and System Implementation
Implementing a new system, or transforming a product concept into an application can be a daunting multi-step process of scoping, requirements elaboration, technology selection, architecture design, capability sourcing, project management, implementation, and operations.
A good CTO organizes and manages the implementation process.
Strategic Business Alignment
The technology capabilities and practices in your company must align with its business strategies. A CTO can review the effectiveness of your technical management to optimally deliver your business objectives at the right cost and time investments.
Building a Technical Organization
Your technical team might be in-house, outsourced, or a combination. A CTO can define a technical organization and the roles within the organization.
With our extensive experience of running technical organizations, we can help to set up the HR structures and practices for recruitment, roles and responsibility definition, performance, remuneration and promotion management. We can also help to recruit and select the right managers, engineers, and partners.
Technology Implementation Practices
Your project practices can have an out-sized effect on implementation cost and quality. Rework, waste, and quality issues in your project could be due to your project management, requirements gathering, source code and configuration management, integration, testing, and deployment practices. You've heard of buzzwords like agile development, CI/CD, automated testing, etc. Are these the right practices for you?
A CTO can identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement, and manage the implementation of the specific relevant practices.
Technology Architecture and Roadmap
Using the latest technologies might be the right investment that saves cost in the long run, or might be a costly overkill that diverts attention and resources from what makes a difference. Besides the capabilities and long term capabilities of technologies, choosing the right architecture and roadmap must take into consider implementation and operation costs of engineers and infrastructure.
Technology Migration
You might want to migrate to some new technologies and platforms because your current technology stack might be limiting what you can do with your app, or might be costing too much to operate profitably. Is being cloud-native, and using micro-services what you need for scalability while minimizing infrastructure costs, or is it a fools errand?
A CTO would help with the decision of whether you should adopt a new technology or platform taking into account the resource and time costs, and manage the migration where necessary.
Training and Mentoring
Whether you're adopting new practices or technologies, or want to ensure that all staff are up to speed, we can customize and deliver the training and mentoring required.
Who We Are
Zipify is led by Chin-Chau Low, a senior technologist with more than 30 years of experience, many of them in a CTO role in various organizations including startups, and in various industries, including financial services, public services, and transportation. You can read this page for more details.
I also write a blog and a YouTube channel on coding practices.