Let’s say you have a problem at hand. Maybe it is a new idea that you want to implement in your business, or you just want to run a check on how your software development team has been doing lately. While this may seem easy on the outside, it could sometimes require more than your expertise.
This is where a CTO plays its role. A Chief Technology Officer gives suitable suggestions on what technology should be used to solve the problem efficiently. This guide will give you an in-depth overview of a CTO and why you need to hire CTO services for your business.
What Is CTO as a Service (Caas)?
CTO or CaaS stands for Chief Technology Officer. They are individuals within the industry that overview the technologies being used within an organization.
CTO as a service can help business performance growth and prevents any operational risks from coming your way. The individuals can deliver priceless value through experience and help create your development plan and pitch a project.
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What Is the Difference Between a Full-Time CTO and Caas?
The main difference between a full-time CTO and CaaS is pretty self-explanatory. The CaaS officer chooses to be a part-time cto for the business which means that their work is limited to a few hours only, whereas a full-time CTO is an individual who offers his service for all the working hours.
Why CTO as a Service Became Popular?
In recent years, more businesses have shown interest in hiring CTO as a service; thus, it has grown more popular. The main reason why most businesses are eager to hire a CTO as a service is because it helps them to draw a development plan and make all the needed adjustments to speed up the product development process and efficiency of their software development team.
Types of CTO Services
The type of CTO depends on what your business requires from a chief technical officer. For instance, if you just need a technical consultant, then an external part-time CTO would work, whereas in-house employment would be the best option if you need full-time business support.
Here are six key CTO types:
1- Full-Time Internal CTO Services
A full-time chief technology officer must provide your business with in-depth technical knowledge and business support. A full-time internal CTO will provide their support at every step from planning to designing and sometimes in soft skills if needed.
However, while hiring full-time internal CTO services, you will have to consider all the expenses that come along with it, such as the office rent and labor taxes.
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2- Full-Time Virtual CTO Services
A full-time virtual CTO does the same job as the full-time internal officer but from behind the screen. They have the same expertise as a full-time CTO and are also able to provide their services 40 hours per week (same as an officer working in-house)
If you hire virtual CTO services, you can take up all the benefits of an internal CTO while paying a reasonable salary. Steal of a deal, isn’t it?
3- Fractional CTO Services
A fractional CTO is a chief technology officer who works part-time. This means that when companies hire fractional CTO services, they agree upon how many hours they require the service and pay according to that. Fractional CTO services are the most used and affordable external CTO services.
4- One-Time CTO Services
One-time CTO services also mean a Part-time CTO who is only focused on a specific section of technical and business responsibilities and processes. One-time CTO services are employed mainly by businesses to look into tech or run an audit.
5- Interim CTO Services
An interim CTO is a specialized expertise employed to briefly help with specialized business obligations while the organization recruits a full-time internal CTO.
When an organization is searching for another Chief Technical Officer, it is expected to work without a CTO, and you risk your innovative cycles and choices. To avoid such dangers and stay dynamic and upheld, it is best to hire interim CTO services. Besides, such a specialized expert may briefly supplant your colleague and assist with recruiting the new CTO.
6- Startup CTO Services
A Startup CTO is an experienced individual who helps a startup come up with a development plan and execute it accordingly. They also take note of the equipment needed in the development plan and keep an eye on the entire development process.
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When Do You Need an External CTO?
A CTO’s responsibility is not limited to a few tasks. They can help your business in various aspects. At the same time, most companies hire a CTO to assist them with technical consultations. You may also hire an external CTO when:
- You have a product strategy in mind but need to determine the technical apparatus that will be needed.
- You need to ensure whether the technologies you are using are suitable for your business or not.
- You have an MVP ready in hand and need to display it to the stakeholders.
- You are a well-settled startup and are looking for a way to scale up your business.
- You need to ensure that your internal technology is up to date and competitive enough.
How to Outsource a CTO: A Step-By-Step Guide
In recent years, more and more startups have turned towards hiring CTO as a service. However, most businesses still suffer from outsourcing a CTO. Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can effectively outsource a CTO.
Step 1: Where to Look for an Interim CTO?
Luckily options are abundant when it comes to outsourcing a CTO. If you have been running the business for a while now, then you must have built contacts with other companies and can ask their CTOs to assist you with your business; however, you will have to keep in mind that they will already have a lot on their plate and might not be able to give a lot of time to your business. Still, they will be a good fit for friendly advice.
If you want a dedicated CTO for your business, then LinkedIn would be a great platform. It has millions of dedicated professionals, and you can surely find some good ones for your business. However, most people on LinkedIn are freelancers, so you will have to negotiate and compensate to ensure they are giving the best to your business.
Lastly, if searching for CTO is not your cup of tea, you can try giving CTO as a service company a go. They are a preferable choice since they have a bunch of experienced individuals ready to provide CTO as a service.
We at Hapy provide interim CTO services for every kind of business. We aim to provide you with the three most popular ways to employ a CTO: work with a freelancer, bring in a specialist, or discover a trustworthy specialist from an outsourcing firm.
Step 2: How to Understand That a Candidate Is a Perfect Match?
Once you are done searching for an interim CTO, you will have a handful of candidates fitting your requirements. Now you can’t recruit everyone and must choose the best among them all. To make your architectural and technical decisions, interview each candidate.
During the interview, you need to assess two things: technical and product.
In the technical, you will have to comprehend whether their technical experience can bring any value to your business. For this, you can inquire about the projects they have worked on in the past and how those projects could benefit your startup. You may also ask if they have worked on similar projects in the past.
Now coming to the product part, you will have to be a bit more cautious because a tech Guru is of no use if they cannot grasp the dynamics of your product in the first place.
Ask what the target audience of their product is, how the product can help the pain points of your customer base, whether their product is available for mobile users or website users, or both, and how you think the minimum viable product of the product should be a lookalike.
Once you are done with these questions, you will probably have a perfect candidate who suits your business objective.
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Step 3: Set up a Smooth Communication Flow
Unlike an In-House CTO, your Outsourced CTO will presumably work with you from home. Notwithstanding, all drawbacks of remote participation can be effortlessly ignored by setting up a suitable correspondence situation.
As the Development Team that ordinarily chips away at projects from a distance, you will frequently need to get the most extreme contact with your clients from different pieces of Europe and the World by utilizing programming tools,
These are the ones that we see as the most helpful and easy to use:
- Slack — to oversee correspondence inside the group;
- Skype or Hangouts — to answer your clients
- Trello, Jira — to lay out a straightforward and clear undertaking of the board cycle.
CTO’s Roles and Responsibilities
A CTO can help you with various issues related to your business. Here are some of the CTO’s roles and responsibilities:
1- Discovery Phase
Many times startups have an incredible product idea in their mind but only lack a development plan. An external CTO can help you in the discovery phase, which may include architectural development, incorporating the best tools, clarifying long and short-term project goals, developing a customizable technical solution, analyzing the opponent’s products, and defining a features list for your MVP.
2- Technical Solutions
The job of the CTO consolidates both profound improvement mastery and business information. Technical solutions are among the Chief Technical Officer’s most important jobs and obligations. Such experts help address the most troublesome technical issues and execute unique arrangements.
By and large, a CTO can help an organization with such tech arrangements:
- Pick the usefulness as per business prerequisites
- Track down answers for specialized difficulties
- Track down the most expense proficient and viable advancements
- Assess the viability of the ongoing tech stack
- Managing technical issues that the client’s group can’t tackle because of the absence of aptitude
- Expanding usefulness
- Design creation and upgrades
- Choice of advancements for compelling versatility
- Complex combinations
3- Project Planning
External CTOs are frequently involved in designing the improvement cycle, focusing on the highlights, and selecting the elements that need the most significant concentration. For instance, such a job of a CTO frequently incorporates plan-making and improvement – feature the interaction and usefulness to streamline and make the entire business more expense productive.
This applies especially when the venture means to scale. For instance, when the quantity of solicitations develops and a framework can’t as of now adapt to them.
CTO as a service can help with the following planning aspects:
- Further developing the advancement of development processes
- Focusing on the elements
- Improving the engineering
- Making an improvement guide
- Assessing financial plans and timetables
4- Project Scaling
A scaling stage is a point at which a specialist becomes an unquestionable requirement. For example, an item can be sufficiently large and proportional yet, at the same time, fizzle with the technical part of scaling. Here a decent CTO will assist you with the business examination, assess the ongoing business needs, and formulate a total scaling system.
During the scaling system, CTO can assist you with:
- Compositional and Technical choices
- Tracking down the most expensive and time-powerful solutions
- Risk-less project extension
- Breaking down the potential methodologies
- Cloud, facilitating, and different improvements
- Making a general, specialized scaling technique
5- Project Pitch
A CTO must be a senior engineer and an individual with a broad scope of master information. This expert is somewhat of a business examiner and business improvement supervisor with profound tech information.
To that end, sellers frequently employ CTOs as a service in their subsidizing rounds to persuade their financial investors.
CTO can address a thought of the venture, show financial backers the skill in a compelling turn of events, and offer the task’s technical arrangements and business benefits.
While pitching your item, a CTO can help you with:
- Set up a tech pitch deck
- Make sense of the technical worth of the task for financial backers
- Portray the business benefits
- Demonstrate that the organization has a profound skill
- Answer any specialized inquiries of the stakeholders
Benefits of an External CTO
1. Costs
Almost every startup now requires a CTO to help devise technical and product-related solutions for the business however hiring a dedicated in-house CTO can often be a significant expense as CTO as a service is quite expensive nowadays.
However, hiring an external CTO won’t be such an enormous burden on your bank account. You can avail all the services while paying a reasonable salary. Surveys show that the average salaries of an external CTO around Europe and Asia are primarily affordable, even for startups.
2. No Need to Hire
Hiring is a huge challenge for businesses. If you work with an eternal CTO, you won’t have to worry about other expenses such as labor taxes or office rent. All you are obligated to pay is for the services you requested. But, if you are still looking forward to hiring someone, the hiring process will just become easier if you have a CTO.
3. Bigger Pool Worldwide
Hiring a CTO from abroad helps you cut down the development expenses and gives you a chance to have more exposure worldwide, thus increasing your pool of professionals.
4. Independency
Hiring an external CTO will avoid office conflicts as they work remotely and independently.
5. Increased Agility
It’s feasible to construct a business without employing a CTO. In any case, that would be a long excursion with an experimentation strategy. Simultaneously, even a couple of technical conferences might explain the focal objective of the business and technical issues. Furthermore, you can get a few new thoughts on the most proficient method to begin or foster your business much quicker.
Why CTO Outsourcing Will Be Helpful in Growing Your Startup Business?
First and foremost, an Outsourced CTO will get the equipment for the Tech Stack that matches your business, Product necessities, and subsidizing so that you’ll prepare a Scalable MVP for the industry market trends. Besides, utilizing the right technology can assist you with accomplishing your business objectives quicker and less expensively.
Also, a similar MVP can be then introduced to Investors. A prepared to-utilize item, even very straightforward, will assist you with getting funds for showcasing and further extension of your Technical Team.
An Outsourced CTO can expand the possibilities of your task to be seen by the financial backers.
Thirdly, since you have all the innovation undertakings relegated to the external individual, you can entirely focus on carving out a full-opportunity In-House CTO, who generally matches your Startup. Don’t bother picking up the pace and recruiting an unexceptional contender for the CTO position since you want to fill the spot as quickly as possible.
Moreover, an external startup CTO can set up the excellent work process and services in your Agile Team without your contribution so that you can zero in on Fundraising, PR, Customer Acquisition, and other business exercises that are significant for Early-Stage Startups.
To wrap things up, they can assist you with building an energetic, focused-on-outcome Product Team by directing meetings with possible competitors, doing code surveys, onboarding new representatives, performing Scrum Mastering, and so on.
The Skillset of CTO as a Service
You’ve chosen to enlist a CTO but do you know what makes a good CTO? Here are some of the best CTO capabilities.
1. Years Of Experience
Regardless of whether an individual has been 15 years in programming improvement, the person in question can in any case still be an intermediate or a beginner designer. Yet at the same time, the useful foundation is definitely not the only, yet one of the main things to consider.
When picking a CTO, follow these tips:
- Pick an individual with something like 5 years of experience
- Ensure your CTO has a down-to-earth foundation
- Focus on the circles your CTO worked with
- Check in the event that the individual has basically a time of involvement with each front-end, back-end, and versatile turn of events
Tech Expertise
Breaking down your CTO’s technical abilities, take a gander at the technical capabilities that your project needs. For instance, in the event that you are dealing with the web item, it’s not needed but would be a benefit for your CTO to have insight into the portable turn of events. Adaptable aptitude will let you know that your CTO is an accomplished proficient to deal with your product.
Along these lines, your future tech expert should have:
- Aptitude in the advancements your venture utilizes
- At least one year of training in every specialized region
- Wide comprehension of all the specialized phrasing
2. Business-Oriented Mind
There is a significant contrast between an accomplished designer and a CTO.
CTO should figure out the technical as well as the business part of the task. This is an individual who offers arrangements in light of his experience and chooses tech arrangements that will truly assist with taking care of the ongoing industry issue.
3. Communicative
CTOs are individuals who deal with the work of other people, present their business and technical plans to the pioneers and a group, and pitch the item to the financial backers. Without strong communicative abilities, a CTO will not have the option to play out the expected undertakings.
4. Business Analysis Skills
Pursuing the improvement directions and wanting to utilize new advances is perfect. In any case, each CTO should have the option to contemplate the promotion arrangements and patterns to pick just those advancements that can assist with supporting efficiency and making an effective product.
5. Big Picture Thinker
While the remainder of the group can zero in on the product subtleties that are dealing with, CTO should have the option to think decisively to appreciate the situation completely to do the right advances to accomplish the last objective.
Is Outsourcing CTO Services Essential for Your Business Startup?
Whether or not Outsourced CTO services are essential for your startup depends on why you need CTO as a service in the first place. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing CTO services.
Advantages
1. Cost Effectiveness
Outsourced CTO as a service will without a doubt assist an organization with setting aside some cash. You will not spend any cash on the recruiting system, compensations, or different expenses related to full-time representatives.
2. Speedy CTO Expert Change
Not happy with the work your CTO does? It is a lot more straightforward to see as another one in the event that you pick CaaS since you’re not searching for a full-time frame representative.
3. Focus On Fundamental Business Exercises
By picking CaaS, you’ll have the option to appoint a portion of your errands and spotlight more significant business exercises.
Disadvantages
1. Correspondence Issues.
Employing a remote, seaward CTO can be marginally difficult in the event that the individual lives in an alternate time region. Thus, try to check the individual’s accessibility and work hours forthright.
2. Management Issues.
Entrepreneurs find it hard to quit being entirely in charge of everything with regard to projects. But there is a compelling reason you don’t need to deal with everything without anyone else with a solid CTO.
Before pursuing the last choice, try to distinguish your organization’s necessities and capacities, like the financial plan. Ideally, keeping these upsides and downsides will assist you with choosing all the more without any problem. It ends up being clear on the advantages and disadvantages of Why Businesses Need CTO Consulting Services.
Where to Find a CTO as a Service?
Looking for a reliable CTO as a service? We have got your back.
Hapy co is a digital agency offering great Product Design, Webflow, MVP Development, and CTO as a service. Hapy comes to you with a decent month-to-month membership model planned around your achievements and difficulties.
We furnish an open line of correspondence with clients to guarantee projects are on target. You get limitless corrections and a group of experienced CTO to take care of business. For a balanced monthly expense, you can quit stressing over supplanting freelancers and agencies.
Bottom Line
CTO is a decent answer for helping you with pretty much every business and technical question.
Such service might be great for various sorts of organizations yet is wonderful, particularly for startups. As it is the savviest method for having a specialist with such profound information and involvement with the group.
A CTO as a service can assist you with:
- Picking the right tech equipment
- Settling muddled technical projects
- Deciding center highlights
- Finding the right business and tech opportunities nearby
- Recruiting new representatives, group creation, and backing
- Pitching your undertaking to financial backers
FAQs
What Should a New CTO Do First?
First, make your own dedicated to-do list and then ask other employees what they are expecting from you, and then compose another list of goals.
What Does a CTO Do on an Everyday Basis?
The job of a CTO is to keep track of how a business is performing and what could be done better to attract more customers and clients.
