The signals
- Decisions are being made by default — whoever is building something chooses, with no wider view.
- You cannot evaluate what suppliers tell you, so recommendations are accepted or refused on instinct.
- Two or more developers, at which point someone must decide how they work together.
- Technology is a material part of what you sell, rather than something you use.
- Something significant broke and nobody internally could assess what happened.
Two or more of these and it is time. One, and a fractional arrangement is probably enough.
What technical leadership actually does
Not writing code, mostly. Deciding what to build and what to buy, setting standards, evaluating suppliers, managing technical risk, and translating between the business and the people building things.
The translation function is the one businesses underestimate. Someone who can turn a commercial requirement into a technical brief, and a technical constraint into a commercial trade-off, is worth a great deal.
The fractional option
A day a week of an experienced technical leader is a well-established arrangement and suits businesses that need judgement rather than capacity.
- Supplier evaluation and technical due diligence
- Architecture decisions before they are made badly
- Reviewing what is being built, periodically
- Being the person your developers can ask
- Hiring support when you do build a team
Typically £800–£1,500 a day in the UK, one to four days a month. Far less than a salary and adequate for most businesses below about five technical staff.
What to look for
Someone who asks about the business before recommending technology, who has worked at your scale rather than only at large companies, and who is comfortable saying “buy that rather than build it”.
Beware the candidate who wants to rebuild everything. Enthusiasm for a rewrite in the first month is a signal about them rather than about your systems.
Do not hire one to fix a supplier relationship
If the problem is a supplier who is not delivering, hiring internally to manage them rarely fixes it and adds cost. Address the supplier relationship directly.
Hire technical leadership because you need decisions made well, not as a proxy for a difficult conversation.