A Fractional CTO — and the Team Behind Him.

A fractional CTO is a senior technology executive who works with a company on a part-time or retained basis rather than as a full-time employee. They hold the CTO role — owning the technical strategy, architecture decisions, vendor relationships, and build oversight — but at a fraction of the cost and commitment of a full-time hire. A fractional CTO is right for companies that need senior technical judgment and accountability but are not at a stage where a full-time CTO is the right investment. The arrangement scales up or down as the company grows.

A fractional CTO owns the technical direction of the business. Day-to-day, that includes setting and defending the technology roadmap, making or validating architecture decisions, evaluating and managing vendors and development teams, hiring or vetting technical staff, representing the technical function to investors and the board, and ensuring that what is being built actually maps to what the business needs. The scope depends on engagement level. At the advisory level, a fractional CTO acts as a senior sounding board and decision reviewer. At the embedded level, they run the technical function end to end. Vizion's engagement also includes hands-on development capacity — the Vizion dev pod — so the CTO's decisions can be executed by the same team.

Fractional CTO cost depends on the engagement level: the number of hours per month, the depth of involvement, and whether the arrangement is advisory-only or includes hands-on build and management work. At Vizion, we do not publish a rate card before we understand your situation — because a company that needs 10 advisory hours a month has a very different engagement than one that needs a fractional CTO to run their entire technical function. What we can say: the engagement is structured to match what your stage actually requires. You pay for the leadership level you need — no padded retainer, no billable hours for work that does not move your business. The right starting point is a free Tech Assessment with Jashan, which gives him enough context to recommend the right engagement structure and give you a clear cost picture.

A full-time CTO gives you full attention and organizational ownership — and costs significantly more in salary, equity, and onboarding time. It is the right move when the technical function is large enough and complex enough to justify that commitment. An agency gives you execution capacity but no strategic ownership — they build what they are told to build, and the decisions still land on the founder. A fractional CTO gives you the strategic ownership and accountability of a senior technical leader without the full-time cost, and scales to execution when the work demands it. Vizion's fractional CTO is distinct from a typical fractional arrangement because it includes access to a delivery team — so you get the strategy and the execution from one accountable source.

Both. Vizion's fractional CTO engagement is not a pure advisory service. Jashan sets the technical direction and owns the decisions — and Vizion's on-demand development team is available to execute that direction when your roadmap needs it. You can engage the dev pod for specific builds, for build oversight on your existing team's work, or for a full end-to-end delivery engagement. The point is that the advice and the execution do not have to be separated. Most fractional CTO arrangements create a handoff gap — the CTO advises, and then you find someone else to build. Vizion closes that gap.

The right time is usually when one or more of these is true: you are a non-technical founder making technical decisions you are not confident in; you are scaling and your current technical setup was built for a smaller version of your company; you are preparing for a raise and need a credible technical leader who can engage with investors; you have a dev team or agency but no senior technical oversight of what they are actually building; or you are at an inflection point where the technical architecture needs to evolve and no one currently owns that decision. If any of these describes your situation today, a free Tech Assessment is the right first step — it costs nothing, and it tells you exactly where the gaps are.