Twenty Years as an Interim Fractional CTO, and Jerry Garcia
I have always kept very busy. In 2007, I had two kids under two, two fractional CTO jobs — one interim and one long term, and played in two regularly gigging bands. Someone asked me how I found time, and I said, “I split things between family, my day-job and music, and provided I never stop to rest, it works out just fine”.
I did end up getting quite ill at one point, and it was my familiarity with fractional working which gave me the flexibility to cut down, but without stopping. I didn’t even leave either band though.
HOW DID IT ALL START?
My original reason for becoming a fractional CTO was simple. My rate was too high for my first ever consultancy client, and I suggested that perhaps they didn’t need me to work five days, per week. I argued that if they hired me to work three days a week, the associated monthly costs were in the same range as a freelance coder, and they agreed. Then I started to look for a couple of advisory jobs to make up the time.
WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT A FREELANCE SENIOR EXECUTIVE?
This is less mysterious. Most corporations want their senior team to “live, think and breathe” their products and company values. Most start-ups want a technical co-founder, who can quickly make their vision into reality. I seem to have a talent both for adopting a whole-heartedly, almost evangelical enthusiasm for almost any good technology or product idea, and for getting new products up and running and out of the door.
Unsurprisingly, there have been failures over the years, but generally speaking, the model works well. That is, despite being freelance, temporary and part-time, most of my clients really have seen me as one of the gang, and as evidence for this, many have re-hired me for a succession of contracts, or kept me on as an advisor after a more intensive role.
However, the ones who insist on full-time work simply might not believe that it is possible for someone to add enough value, working part-time or short-term … until they have tried. Sometimes a low-cost, low-intensity start, e.g. a few days over a couple of months, is all that is needed. I have started a lot of contracts, working every second Friday, to find that there is a good fit, and establishing what I can deliver without using up too much time. At that stage, a ~50% fractional role, seems like plenty.
That said, the lack of an actual long term commitment, rather than my apparent day-to-day commitment, might well be a clue to why this work suits me. I always tell recruiters that I am not totally averse to a permanent job, but it would have to have two things, which rarely go hand in hand:
- Products I really believe in
- Ongoing innovation
Even the most challenging developments and inventive products, usually get to a point of maturity, where effective operational management is more important to the business than innovation. Then it is time to hire an operational guru.
So, the freelance/interim approach works well for everyone, who understands that most work goes in phases for which different resources are needed.
MY RULES
Over the first few years, and a couple of experiments with different mixtures of work, I came up with some rules, which without intending to be strict about it, I stuck to for a very long time:
- Charge all clients the same and so, never negotiate on rate
- Avoid creating conflicts of interests, so:
- don’t suggest extensions; clients often will anyway
- keep clients informed, e.g. if you are booking work beyond end date
- don’t supply other resources, except experts for small SoWs
- Keep at least two clients on the go, giving you and clients flexibility, with a low risk of ever being totally without income
- Keep some availability, even just one day a month, so that interesting new clients can be engaged, even when already highly committed
- Split time between morning and afternoon, when working on two big things, so that each team gets to see you every day.
STICKING TO THE RULES
I have been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of years, because I have broken all the rules, and am now working out how to get back to my usual MO. I have just finished the second of two full-time contracts, which together lasted over two and a half years.
In both cases, I suggested a fractional contract, and it was only on the clients’ insistence that I work full time. I now firmly believe that they both — in restrospect, would accept that that they would have got better value, on costs and outcomes with a fractional contract.
Firstly, enforced focus makes people play to their strengths. When corporates have hired me fractionally, they never seem to bother involving me in low-level minutiae of budget spreadsheets, with their arbitrary distinctions between opex and capex. They keep me out of complex HR processes, apart from choosing whom to hire and fire. They have fewer unproductive meetings, leaving me time to engage with technology teams and stakeholders.
Even if there really were 40 hours per week of useful technological tasks to complete, the chances are good, that in many cases, two niche experts at different aspects of the job, would provide better value than one. Maybe, I should make better use of the substitution clause (present in most contracts), and just split the role up myself. My guess is that those who prefer full-time resources, would then be quick to make better use of the termination clause.
MAYBE I’M IN THE WRONG JOB, BUT I DON’T THINK SO
Perhaps I haven’t been lucky enough to find an ongoing, full-time Innovation Director role, or perhaps I am too quick to volunteer to take on a few operational duties, which would eventually be better fulfilled if handed on to someone else.
I have never systematically searched for the perfect career-defining job. However, not having a vocational approach, has led me into all sorts of things, just because they have come along at the right time, with engaging people:
- Scalable media production (many times)
- AV search (even in Welsh and Farsi)
- Cardiac health screening
- Catch-up TV
- Gene amplification (really)
- Social learning for tertiary education
- Automated arbitrage (more than once)
- 3D animation (Genius Glasgow fireman, Dreeko, made this in 2 hours)
What seems like short-term opportunism actually works strategically
My first part-time, temporary, freelance contract, included, amongst other things, retrospectively documenting the end-to-end infrastructure and operations of “open-source intelligence” outfit, BBC Monitoring in Caversham, working with an old colleague from the World Service.
I realised at this point that 60% was great for a part-time job, with a bit of time for NED roles or short due-diligence gigs. However, by cutting each major contract to 50% or less, I found I could do multiple significant jobs in parallel. Further, by leaving 10% free, there is time every week or fortnight, to try things out with new clients.
This approach led to what in hindsight was my canonical perfect contract. It started with half a day a week, working on the concept for a new product. As we hired developers, I jumped to ~50%, as “Launch CTO”, until just about when the product was live and clearly growing, and then I went back to my half-day, while the new CTO found his feet. It was exactly a full calendar year, with six or seven months of half-time work, leading to a successful product launch, and smooth succession.
It wasn’t unproblematic, after all I am paid to solve problems, and here is the bizarre story of my contribution:
SUCCESSES AT 50% OR LESS
Over the last twenty years, the fractional CTO roles, I have performed, have been a mixed bag, but including some very high-profile products. All of the following, were successfully delivered as a 50% CTO :
- ITV’s catch-up service 2006/07
- FutureLearn 2013
- Get BBC Redux ready to deploy at National TV Library 2014
- The Beano website and apps launch 2016/17
Others have been largely less consumer-focused, in areas ranging from Fintech to eLearning to primary healthcare, but one in particular, could be a great model going forward. The delivery of an MVP in a couple of months working an affordable 20% of my time, for self-funding non-technical founders. That one included the lucky hire of an excellent one-man-band, full-stack, design-savvy developer.
WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?
I prefer ground-up product development. It is easier, more fun and is generally more impressive to outsiders. However, complex transformations have been where I have learned the most, e.g. about what kinds of mistakes people make, what the consequences are and how things can be fixed. Sometimes, very successful business have dozens or even hundreds of accumulated problems, and leading a transformation can provide deep understanding of how to do things better, which applies elsewhere.
Context-switching is better than multi-day dives … for me. I do know people who prefer to focus on the same thing for days or weeks, and work better that way. As mentioned, being able to meet daily with multiple teams is extremely valuable. In fact, I prefer to keep regular hours with each company, but that does sometimes get in the way of orthodoxies — I can’t be in two morning stand-up meetings.
I like the variety, for reasons beyond my profession. I have ended up working with some extraordinary people, ranging from the team who set up Al Jazeera English, to the editor of The Beano, to people with superhuman levels of drive and tenacity, from influential media executives, Michael Grade, Greg Dyke and the late documentary-maker, Roger Graef, to entrepreneurs like Mike Lynch and Jeremy Coller. I have learned about subjects as diverse as web-ad arbitrage, atrial fibrilation, jigsaw learning and multi-regional SIM cards.
I keep my technology knowledge up-to-date. Having studied Lisp at Cambridge, I was intrigued to work on a product entirely in Clojure, without having to decide whether Clojure really is the future. I have been involved in pure Ruby-on-Rails development, without having to make it a career strategy. On the other hand, I was a fairly early adopter of Scrum and Devops and am now a complete zealot about both. The (generally younger) people I work with, don’t need to advise on whether Ruby or Clojure is better for a particular task, but they have helped me get to a position, where I could do just that.
DEALING WITH FRACTIONAL WORK SKEPTICS
As well as those who believe that there is too much work for a part-timer, many clients don’t like to think of their key resources working for others. More than once, I have argued a contract down, to a level where I can reliably add value, only to have the client push it up and up, giving me more and more diverse things to do, only to get resentful, when that doesn’t offer them good value, because they are either making work for me, or pushing me into the wrong areas.
In future, when I can’t see the value of what I am being asked to do, will I stick to my guns and say no? When a reliable payer offers me more work, just as a brown envelope from HMRC arrives, or when I have just taken a dip in pay, after finishing a parallel assigment, or both, it is very hard to say no.
However, I work best, when it is obvious to everyone that I offer good value. Delivering world-class products as a 50% resource, is a win-win. The client gets a CTO for the price of a coder, and I get overlapping jobs providing continuity of income and diversity.
In the negotiations leading to one of my full-time roles, I suggested a fractional approach, and then when that didn’t wash, I suggested a four-day week. If we could turn back time, I feel that the client would have gone for it.
EPILOGUE: Am I adding music references to essay titles, to con music fans into reading a load of boring work crap?
The truth is less interesting. Since I was about 14, when my interest in skateboards was on the wane, I have spent much of my time thinking about music, and still play all the time.
Jerry Garcia: fractional guitarist
It is well-documented that the Grateful Dead were an interesting phenomenon, in no small part because they were insanely hardworking, playing 100+ major venues a year for years on end. Despite the intensity of touring, and the pressure which came with the success of the band, as a business, Jerry Garcia did a similar number of non-Grateful Dead shows.
Being a lead guitarist in the middle of a national tour, seems like a full-time job, but throughout his career, from his pedal steel work in The New Riders of the Purple Sage in 1969, to playing with the Jerry Garcia Band up until his death in 1995, Jerry was the lead guitarist of multiple bands in parallel. Being a CTO of a start-up, major product development or corporate transformation, also seems like a full-time job, but my biggest successes of the last 20 years, have been while doing at least two such jobs at the same time.
