Senior technical decisions, made before you can hire for them.
Hiring, architecture, vendor sign-off: the calls a CTO owns, taken on part time by someone senior enough to be trusted with them, for the stretch where a full-time seat is not yet the right move.
What this is
CTO as a service is one senior engineer taking ownership of the decisions a company cannot yet justify a full-time executive to make: what gets built first, who gets hired next, whether the agency's timeline is honest, whether the current architecture survives the next stage of growth. Not a report handed over at the end of an engagement. Somebody who stays accountable for the call after it is made, the way a CTO would, on part of the week rather than all of it.
The gap this fills is time, not judgment. A proper CTO search runs three to six months: a recruiter, a shortlist, technical interviews that need somebody senior enough to run them, references, a notice period, and then the ramp once they start. None of that pauses the decisions that need making in the meantime. They get made anyway, usually by whoever is loudest in the room, or by default, into whatever the current vendor already proposed. Filling that stretch is most of what this engagement does.
The failure mode it is usually called in to fix is the same one twice. A technical co-founder who wrote the original product is now spending most of the week on the business side, and the code review that used to be thorough has quietly become a rubber stamp. Or the company is hiring its first engineers and running the interview the way it runs every other interview, which catches confidence and misses whether the candidate can actually do the job, because nobody in the loop is senior enough to tell the difference.
WMinus also builds software, which is a real conflict when the advice is build vs buy. We say so when it applies: a recommendation that happens to create work for us gets flagged as one, not delivered as if it were neutral, and the engagement is judged on whether the company's decisions got better, not on whether they turned into a contract.
What you get
Technical baseline
A written read of what exists on day one: the stack, the team, the vendor contracts, and what happens the day each one fails.
Hiring, run properly
Job specs that describe the actual gap on the team, and a senior person in the interview loop for every technical hire, with a written recommendation per candidate.
Vendor and agency sign-off
Every agency deliverable and invoice gets a technical read before it gets paid. "Two more sprints" either has evidence behind it or it does not.
Architecture decisions on paper
Data model, hosting, build vs buy: the calls that are expensive to reverse, made once and written down with the reasoning, not re-argued from memory by the next hire.
A standing decision log
Every non-trivial call and why it was made, kept somewhere a full-time hire can read on day one instead of interviewing the founder about the last two years.
Technical due diligence, ready before it is asked for
The document an investor's or acquirer's technical reviewer actually requests, prepared before the data room opens rather than assembled the week it does.
A handover plan
What a full-time CTO needs to take over cleanly, and active involvement in that hire if you want it, so the engagement's job is to end.
When this fits, and when it does not
A good fit
- You have engineers on staff and nobody senior enough to tell if their decisions are right.
- You are hiring your first technical people and do not trust the process to catch a bad one.
- A fundraise or an acquisition is coming and a technical reviewer will be in the data room.
- An agency has been running the build for a while and nobody has checked its work against what was actually promised.
- A technical co-founder now spends most of the week on the business side, and the code has stopped getting the attention it used to.
Not a good fit
- You need a full-time person at a desk running the engineering team day to day. That is a hire, and pretending a part-time arrangement is the same thing helps nobody.
- You already have someone senior in the seat and want a second read on one decision. That is the architecture review under consulting, a smaller and cheaper thing.
- You want a credible name in the pitch deck who never actually looks at the company. We show up and make calls, or we do not take the engagement.
- You want the answer to always be build it, and build it with us. We say so when a recommendation touches our own capacity, and we would rather flag the conflict than have you find it later.
- You need this decided today. Somebody taking on accountability for a company's technical direction needs at least a short read of what exists first, and we do not skip that to close faster.
How it runs
- 01
Read the company
Team, codebase where there is one, current vendors, and who actually decides what today. Written notes before anything gets proposed.
- 02
Agree what moves first
Hiring, vendor sign-off or architecture, usually in that order because hiring is what is normally most overdue. A short list, not a vague mandate.
- 03
Set the cadence
A regular session with the team, plus a defined way to reach the person for anything that cannot wait for it. Part time means structured, not on call for everything.
- 04
Decide and write it down
Every call that matters goes into the decision log with its reasoning, so it survives past one person's memory and a future hire can read it rather than ask around.
- 05
Hand over, on purpose
Toward a full-time hire if and when you want one, with active help through that search. The engagement is built to end, not to renew itself quietly.
Questions we get
How many hours a week is this?
It varies with what needs deciding that month, not a fixed headcount number. Expect a regular session with the team plus availability for anything that cannot wait, agreed up front rather than metered afterward.
Will the recommendation always be to hire WMinus to build it?
No, and we say so when it would be. WMinus also builds software, which means a build recommendation that happens to point at our own capacity is a real conflict of interest, not a hypothetical one. We flag it explicitly when it applies rather than let you find it later, and plenty of engagements end with a build-vs-buy call that has nothing to do with us.
What happens once we hire a full-time CTO?
The engagement's job is to make itself unnecessary. We hand over the decision log, help run the search if you want that, and step back once someone is in the seat. Staying on past that point is the exception, not the plan.
Is it one person, or the whole team behind them?
One senior person owns the relationship and the decisions, backed by whoever on the team the problem actually needs: an engineer who has done the specific integration, someone who has sat through a due-diligence review before. You are not paying for one person's calendar.
Need the decisions made properly?
Describe where the company is and what is not getting decided. An engineer reads it and you get a straight answer about whether this is the right fit.