CTO As A Service
We are all used to things going a certain way. First, we were all about an office-based in-house team; then, we learned to outsource and got used to remote work, but there are some roles we couldn’t imagine being outsourced, like a CTO. Yet, here we are. Primalcom offers outsourcing CTO services to raise your company to the next level with reduced operational risks and costs, augmented strategy, and implementation of innovative solutions. Try a free consultation today.
How Can CTO Services Help Your Business?
Whether you just moved from your parents’ garage into an office or have been a threat to your competitors for years, you may benefit from acquiring a chief technology officer. CTO as a service is a great idea if you lack not only technical expertise but is also useful for broadening your complex strategic vision and aligning with trends in the market and software development.
When do you not need CTO as a service?
- You have a great idea and enough technical expertise.
- You are completely sure what tech stack and team you need and even know how to conduct a project audit correctly.
- You can pitch an idea and MVP or POC yourself before an investors’ buy-in presentation.
- You know how to outstand competitors using smart tech solutions.
- You’re experienced in scaling the business and its digital transformation.
- You’ve undergone the rebuild of internal infrastructure.
- You’re good at fitting in the regulatory requirements.
- Your previous CTO left, and you will be just fine without a replacement before hiring a new permanent CTO.
- All your development teams are brilliant without senior advice and an unbiased vision.
- You have enough money to get a full-time in-house CTO.
- You’re a specialist in technical questions like integration of new technologies or tech diversification, new product development, etc.
- No one makes better strategic and operational plans than you do.
- Your quality assurance is the best on the planet, and you have no technical issues to fix.
If all the above do not portray you, let’s find out how our CTO as a service may help, except for outstanding technical skills, of course.
The core idea of CTO as a service is to analyze, evaluate, and rebuild or optimize the existing strategy of your company according to your business needs, market conditions, and tech trends.
Except for strategy, CTOs should also have experience working with project planning, auditing, optimization, and scaling.
A good fit for you is a chief technology officer who can provide advanced quality assurance, lead controls, and improve performance, delivery, and deployment.
CTO as a service allows you to contribute to new technologies in software development and proven effective approaches.
The chief technology officer is called chief because this person does not fix simple bugs but has a long-term vision and works on more complex and intricate issues.
Not only do you get rid of legacy code and technologies with CTO as a service, but you also obtain vast expertise and a broad vision, fast engagement in a project, and reduced operational and strategic risks.
Acquiring an experienced CTO creates new possibilities for your business, including pleasing investors and stakeholders more.
Types of CTO Services
- Defining the company’s values and aims
- Product design
- Architecture conferring
- Deployment of on-site and cloud systems
- Quality assurance
- Development of infrastructure
- Execution of Agile approaches
- Internal culture maintenance
- Aligning the hiring process with the company’s culture
- Team development
- Strategic management
- Resource evaluation
- Phase planning
- POC/MVP development
- Prevention of system shutdowns
- Consulting on cost optimization
- Building impervious architecture
- Architecture audit
- Securing practices implementation
- Cloud infrastructure optimization
- Cloud migration
- Performance analysis and improvement
- Compliance consulting
- Enhancement of processes management
- Leadership and mentoring
Full-time internal
- Full-time technical and business support in the development, planning, and soft skills management in real-time on-site.
Prevention of system shutdowns
- Full-time in-house expert, yet working remotely.
Part-time offshore or fractional CTO
- CTO that works on the agreed amount of hours, providing high-quality services at a minimal cost.
One-time CTO
- CTO on a fixed price for a particular project to deal with troubleshooting or conduct audits.
Interim CTO services
- Temporary technical consultant for a transition period before hiring a full-time CTO.
Benefits of CTO as a Service
Starting a new business or striving to bring an existing one to a new level can be stressful and comes with many challenges. Adopting CTO as a service may open new horizons for your organization and improve its quality. Let’s dive into the advantages you’ll get if you hire a CTO.
- Reduce operational costs
- Access talent worldwide
- Obtain business processes agility
- Acquire a helicopter view
- Accelerate growth
- Broaden your technology stack and expertise
- Gain an unbiased specialist
- Soar performance
- Increase the value of deliverables
- Strengthen strategy
- Surge the flexibility of development teams
- Expand your vision
- Procure technical leadership
- Prioritize tasks smarter
- Enhance team building
- Decrease operational risks
- Tailor digital transformation
- Observe industry and market trends smartly
Our CTO as a Service Includes
- Design and development of the system’s architecture
- Tailoring the technical solution
- Choosing the best tools and technology stack
- Defining project aims and objectives
- Determining the main MVP features
- Risk assessment, prevention, and reduction
- Market analysis
- Aligning functions with business and project requirements
- Solutions for technical issues and challenges
- Choosing the most fitting technologies by price and efficiency
- Estimation of the current tech stack
- Expanding the system’s functionality
- Development and scaling of architecture
- Implementation of complicated integrations
- Resource estimation and management
- Assessment of business needs
- Tailoring a digital roadmap for further transformation
- Solutions examination
- Cybersecurity execution and data risk assessment
- Project planning
- Enhancing the development processes
- Prioritizing the tasks
- Improving the system’s architecture
- Building a development roadmap
- Evaluating timelines and budgets
- Project scaling
- Providing time and cost-effective solutions
- Building scalable architecture
- Expanding projects safely
- Choosing the most fitting approaches
- Establishing optimizations
- Development of project strategy
- Project pitch
- Pitch deck preparation
- Clarifying the project’s technical value to investors
- Portraying business advantages
- Confirming the team’s knowledge and experience
- Responding to investors’ tech questions
- Project audit
- Estimation of the code quality
- Validation of the team’s work
- Assessment of the project’s functionality and quality
- Reviewing the work of outsourced teams
- Observing the delivery process
- Creating recommendations for improvements
- Designing standards for technical employees
- Estimating the technical expertise of potential employees
- Leading technical interviews
- Defining the tech team’s soft skills
- Tailoring and implementing the motivation system
- Supporting the team emotionally
- Analyzing, solving, and preventing conflicts
- Team building, management, and leadership
- Expansion of new partnership approaches
CTO Services Stages
When we talk about CTO services stages, we actually mean business lifecycle stages, e.g., ideas creation, early stage startup, MVP launch, raising the company, and market leadership. Let’s look at what the external CTO will do step by step for two companies at different stages of their lifecycle.
- Idea creation or evaluation
- Proof of concept (POC)
- Research and analysis
- Planning and MVP development
- Launch and scaling
- Project audit
- Hiring process
- Roadmapping
- Knowledge sharing
CTO as a Service Tech Stack
A skilled CTO should be equipped with more than technical skills. Despite common beliefs, if we talk about CTO as a service, the technology scope is not about a set of programming languages, AI and ML, cloud computing, data science and management, automation, or DevOps. It is about:
- Technical skills and knowledge
- Time management ability
- Experience
- Mentoring expertise
- Communication talents
- Reviews
- Decision-making skills
- Strategic thinking talents
Why Choose Primalcom as Your CTO as a Service Vendor?
Primalcom does not believe in one-project relationships. We develop partnerships, so you can try our CTO as a service and choose Primalcom among other outsourcing companies to collaborate with.
We strive to innovate, accelerate, and thrive with you as our ally in close collaboration, starting from the discovery phase and continuing after the post-release support stage.
Now, let us tell you more about our CTO as a service. As many of you know, our founder started in junior IT positions, and now he’s very experienced.
Frequently Asked Questions
It’s simple to understand the role of a chief technology officer who works for only one company; now, consider a CTO as a service. So, what is it?
CTO as a service means we provide you with a CTO we hired or, in other words, an outsourced CTO. The CTO’s responsibilities will depend on company objectives, needs, and requirements.
You may think this is just a senior technical specialist or a senior manager without a technical background who is knowledgeable about finances, project management, mentoring, etc. Yet, Primalcom offers you both parts in our CTO as a service.
Our CTO services include leading your company towards success with a strategic vision and technical leadership. CTO as a service will help you reduce operational risks, tailor digital transformation, improve the development process and quality of deliverables, and many more.
Except for the benefits of CTO as a service, this is an integral part of the evolution of your organization and its triumphs. Depending on the point of view, we could call it a new or ancient market trend, but it does not matter. CTO as a service is another reason for you not to look at things traditionally but to find a creative way to evolve with an outside person with an unbiased view.
It is not obligatory to redirect all responsibilities of the permanent CTO to an external specialist; as you look for CTO services, you decide how to use the vast expertise of a technology C-level executive. Whether it’s CTO consulting, interim, fractional CTO, inshore, part-time offshore, or full-time CTO, it is all up to you. We promise to share our experience and provide strategic guidance and support if you decide to hire our CTO as a service.
CTO services include various ranges of roles and responsibilities, yet, of course, some are more common than others.
- Support during the discovery phase
- Determining the technological stack
- Planning, auditing, and scaling the project
- Pitching the idea and product
- Hiring and mentoring the development team
- Assisting the creation of new products and other software and technical solutions
- Verification of service or product quality
- Approving UX/UI design
- Usage of soft skills during team management
You may discuss other responsibilities with the potential CTO to find the most appropriate way to collaborate.
As mentioned above, CTO services are not only about technology. It’s about boosting your business’s path to new opportunities, leadership, transformations, and scaling. Yet, the most common option for CTO as a service is management of the development process. So, we can help if you:
- Have a lack of technical expertise and skills
- Struggle building a development team
- Hesitate meeting investors without properly pitched ideas
- Looking for new technological ways to overcome competitors
- Need to scale your business and systems
- Want to transform your infrastructure
- Considering implementing new technologies
- Considering a digital transformation
- Struggle with industry requirements
- Looking for a temporary replacement for a permanent CTO
- Need someone to lead the development team
- Want to guide the company toward market leadership
Then, it’s time to think about CTO as a service. Except for the replacement option, all those points refer to cases when you should hire a CTO consistently.
As with the cost of any product or service, the cost of CTO services depends on many factors like location, experience, industry, amount of working hours, etc. Check out the hourly rates in different regions for the beginning of the research, as remote work is not a scary word anymore but a part of routine life.
- Eastern Europe ($50-$120/hr)
- Western Europe ($80 – $200/hr)
- South America ($45 – $110/hr)
- Asia (<$65/hr)
You also have to find out about the cooperation models of CTO as a service. There are three popular models of CaaS.
CTO Consulting
If you need CTO services just once, this model is for you because you only pay a fee for one consultation. The CTO consulting model is useful if you need to choose a proper tech scope or find a solution for an emerging technical issue that your in-house (or outsourcing) developers cannot fix.
CaaS Fixed Price
A per quarter or per year fee for ongoing regular strategic sessions with a CTO as a technical consultant. Constant support, what could be better?
CaaS Time And Material
For support in product development and technology management, you should consider this model, as it allows you to ping your outsourced CTO when you need to solve a problem. This uses an hourly rate and is useful for implementing tech innovations or new product development.
So, now you know how to choose CTO as a service wisely.
The type of CTO services you choose, a cooperation model or range of CTO responsibilities, is up to you. CTO consulting as a model is usually a one-time collaboration on a specific issue, yet, you may ask outsourced CTOs to solve other problems so that you can stay together longer. You may even collaborate for years on strategic sessions so you can benefit from a helicopter view and multi-industry experience.