In my experience, most software ventures fail their way into a leadership gap long before they fail their way into a market gap. The founders who built the thing are busy keeping it alive, the organization needs someone who can both open a code review and hold the board accountable, and the board is looking for a permanent executive at a salary the venture cannot sustainably carry — yet.
That is the gap fractional and interim management exists to close: accountable ownership of general and technology leadership, for a bounded period, at a cost that reflects the actual risk on the table instead of a permanent fixed charge.
When it makes sense
A fractional or interim engagement typically fits when:
- The venture has product, but no product leadership. Someone needs to own the roadmap, the delivery organization, and the trade-offs between them — without you having to hire a full-time CPO/CTO before you know the shape of the role.
- Growth outpaced the organization. The system works, the customers are coming, and the operations around the product (processes, tooling, people, vendors) are now the bottleneck.
- A turnaround is needed. The current direction is not working, the team knows it, and the organization needs a neutral party who can say so plainly, set a course, and stay until the course holds.
- A transition has to be managed. A founder is stepping back, an investor is entering, or a new permanent executive is being hired and needs to be handed a stable organization instead of a fire.
This is not the right engagement when you need someone to simply execute a well-defined scope. If the problem is crisp and the team is capable, you need a contractor or a development partner, not a manager.
What I bring to the table
I have sat in the seat on both sides of the table: as a managing director accountable for product portfolio, digitalization, and commercial operations at Tectra, and as a fractional general manager and head of product & technology at Rent21, where I steered the Breek.gr property-management SaaS from incubation through successive major releases. Before that: head of product management at ProcEQ, R&D process ownership at Hilti, turbine development and R&D project management at ABB, and an IMD MBA on top of an engineering background.
What that combination means in practice:
- I can be technically credible without being technically cute. I read the code, I benchmark the systems, I run the inference clusters. I make decisions on the basis of what the engineering evidence shows, not what the architecture slide deck says.
- I manage to outcomes, not to activity. A roadmap that ships nothing of value is a failure even when every sprint is “green”. I hold the team — and my own mandate — to business outcomes with visible metrics.
- I am remote-first and frugal by design. I operate from my own hybrid cloud and self-hosted tooling, so I do not import a cloud bill into your cost structure. My overhead is deliberately small, which is also why the fractional model works at SME-scale budgets.
What an engagement looks like
Every engagement starts with a scoping conversation and ends with a written mandate: the outcome, the boundary conditions, the decision rights, and the exit criteria. No open-ended “we will see” relationships.
Typical parameters:
- Duration: three to twelve months, with a review point in between. Shorter for a specific decision (e.g., a technology migration go/no-go), longer for an organizational turnaround.
- Cadence: a weekly rhythm of working sessions with the leadership team and a written status that goes to the board or owners — short, factual, no spin.
- Reporting line: to the board, the founders, or the owners, as the mandate defines. I am not a peer of the people I am accountable for; I am accountable for them.
If you are not sure whether a fractional engagement is the right instrument, that is fine — the first conversation is exactly where that gets decided, and I will tell you plainly if the answer is “no, you need X instead”.
Start with a conversation about the situation.
