Dan Jacobs - Fractional CTO
Key information:
Experienced fractional CTO based in London, UK
Over 15 Fractional or interim CTO, Senior Tech and Product Leader roles since 2010
Tech advisor to five businesses since 2010
Founded two startups and raised approx £1.5m in funding
Biggest career achievement: co-founding a bank for a large telco
Experience in Fintech/Payments, InsurTech, E-commerce, Digital Transformation, Ed Tech, Web & Mobile Apps
Examples of my fractional CTO work
Farillio (2017 - 2023)
Title: Fractional CTO / first 'hire'.
Achievements: I architected the MVP of the platform, hired a Director of Engineering and then stepped back into a non-exec role. Eventually, I joined Farillio Full time until August 2023. See a testimonial from the founder here
Nimble Tank (2020)
Title: Fractional Tech Director
Achievements: Nimble Tank is a design agency. I designed, built and deliverd a business hub for Natwest providing information, help and support for their SME customers at the start of the Covid pandemic.
The Bio Agency (2019-2020)
Title: Fractional Interim CTO
Achievements: I managed several large digital transformation projects and supported new business with pre-sales. Clients at the time included a UK law firm Hogan Lovells.
Medic Animal (2017)
Title: Fractional Interim CTO
Achievements: Medic Animal are a large international online petstore based in the UK. I bridged the gap between CTO's during a period of huge change with upgrades to Hybris and a new SAP integration landing during my time.
Retail Marketing International (2016)
Title: Fractional Interim CTO
Achievements: RMI hired me to turn an agency product into a SAAS product. I designed, built and delivered a new software platform which was designed in cooperation with Heineken & Unilever (first two customers).
Recent content
The following article was first published on LinkedIn:
Hiring a developer to be your CTO can lead to failure - consider a fractional CTO
June 6, 2023
Over the past ten years, the option of a part-time or fractional CTO has become more popular. A fractional CTO addresses a problem that has plagued early-stage (first 5-8 years) startups for decades; a permanent CTO is expensive and often not needed full-time. But why is a CTO needed at all in the early stages of a business?
It’s very easy for non-technical founders to fall into the trap of either hiring a developer to produce an MVP (minimum viable product) or outsourcing the development of an MVP to a developing country with “cheap” developer resources.
A good developer will typically know how to take your requirements and implement them in code. However, that is just one small part of taking an idea into a working product, and there are many potential pitfalls along the way. I have had to rescue many startups that have floundered because of only having developers and no technical leadership, strategy or oversight.
Here are some of the problems I have encountered when a developer or a team of developers are working without a CTO or other technology leadership:
A developer needs a good set of requirements/user stories. Non-technical founders often struggle to articulate their needs fully and in a way in which developers can understand. They may leave out details which they assume will go in, and they also have a tendency to think they need a lot more features to launch or sell a product than they do. A good fractional CTO will get the core ideas out of a founder, turn them into actionable statements and gets the best version of a product built. In my experience, I’ve seen MVPs built that don’t do what the founder wanted leading to frustrations. Other times the project has taken a lot longer and been a lot more expensive because the founder keeps going back to adjust (in a non-agile way). One mobile app I became involved in ended up taking an Indian outsourcing team 18 months to complete instead of three months because of this very issue. By the time the application was ready, the product had started to lose its uniqueness because other entrepreneurs had spotted the problem they were trying to solve and had started releasing solutions.
Choosing the right stack - by stack, I mean the end-to-end technology choices that need to be made when building an application - is by no means simple. This includes the choice of programming language(s), frameworks, third-party libraries, integrations and other vendors. I’ve joined startups three years in who have suffered from making the wrong choices early on because the developer they hired chose a stack they ‘liked’ and not because it was the best solution to the problem they were solving. The kinds of problems this can cause include choosing a stack that is hard to recruit for, choosing a stack that has a lot of bad devs in its community and therefore ending up with bad devs, choosing buggy libraries or third-party apps that are embedded on integrated into the app that are no longer supported. Another strategic decision a CTO might make it Buy vs Build. When building new features, there are often choices to either write something yourself or buy something that already exists and integrate it. It’s not always an obvious choice and some developers are prone to reinventing the wheel.
I produced this in June 2023 to help explain what a fractional CTO does for startups and scale-ups.