What does CTO-as-a-Service actually include?

A senior technologist embedded with your leadership: vendor evaluation, architecture authority, hiring standards, roadmap ownership, and board-level translation — at a fraction of a full-time CTO's cost, with our whole engineering bench behind them.

When should we bring in advisory rather than start building?

When the expensive decision has not been made yet: build or buy, replace or extend, one platform or three, which vendor, which sequence. Advisory pays for itself by preventing a commitment, not by producing a document. Once the decision is genuinely settled and the requirement is understood, advisory adds cost without adding information — at that point the useful thing is discovery on the build itself.

Will you review a proposal from another firm?

Yes. A second opinion on someone else's architecture, estimate or contract is a common engagement, and it is deliberately scoped so that we are not bidding on the work we are assessing. What we look at is whether the proposed design matches the problem, whether the estimate has the integration and data-migration surface priced, and what the exit terms actually say.

What size of organisation is this for?

The useful test is not headcount but consequence. If a platform decision will bind the organisation for five years or more, or the technology spend has outgrown the ability of any one person to judge it, advisory earns its cost. Below that, a good architect on the build is usually enough, and we will say so rather than sell a strategy phase.

Practice

Technology Advisory

Product discovery, requirements engineering, digital transformation consulting, and CTO-as-a-service — the thinking phase most projects skip, and the reason ours don't fail.

Discuss this practice See related work

Discovery to a plan you can fund: 4–8 wksDiscovery to a plan you can fund
Every artefact, buildable by any competent team: YoursEvery artefact, buildable by any competent team
The reasoning, not just the recommendation: Written downThe reasoning, not just the recommendation

The problem

Software projects rarely fail in the code; they fail in the two months before the code, when nobody asked the right questions. Our advisory practice is that questioning, productised: discovery that produces blueprints worth keeping, and technology leadership for organisations between CTOs or beyond their current one's bandwidth.

How we approach it

Advisory here is not a slide factory. Deliverables are decision-ready: process maps your operators validate, architectures your next vendor could build from, and roadmaps with sequencing logic you can defend to a board.

Accountability

What this practice owns.

Not a scope of works — the things that stay our problem for as long as the engagement runs.

An opinion, in writing, with the reasoning attached — including where we think you should not spend.

Artefacts you keep whether or not we build: process maps, target architecture, phased plan.

Vendor evaluation run to the same scrutiny we would face ourselves.

The board translation — the version your CFO can act on.

Capabilities

4 services in this practice

Each one is a full capability with its own page — the method, what you are handed, the stack, and who it is not for.

Product Discovery & Requirements

The blueprint phase that makes everything after it predictable.

A problem definition your operators sign off on

Digital Transformation Consulting

Sequenced modernisation for organisations ready to stop patching and start rebuilding.

A roadmap operations believes in, not just the board

CTO-as-a-Service

Senior technology leadership on your side of the table, without a full-time hire.

Architecture decisions made once, correctly

Technology Due Diligence

Know what you're buying, funding, or inheriting — before you sign.

Deal price informed by technical reality

What an engagement looks like

How this practice usually starts.

We do not publish prices — scope drives them, and a number without scope is a guess. Everything else about the shape, here.

Starts with: A scoped engagement with a defined artefact at the end
Time to production: 4–8 weeks for discovery or due diligence; fractional CTO is ongoing
Who you get: A principal architect, with specialists pulled in for a day at a time
Commercial model: Fixed fee for defined artefacts; monthly for fractional roles

What drives the number is on engagement models.

Typical stack

Process mapping
Event storming
Prototype spikes
Estimation models
Maturity frameworks
Process mining-lite
TCO modelling
Adoption playbooks
Architecture governance
Delivery audits
Hiring frameworks
Roadmap tooling
Static analysis
Architecture review
Security scanning
Cost modelling

Proof

Where this practice has shipped.

All case studies

Digitising field operations for a power utility

A field-force platform for 2,400 technicians — work orders, asset history, and offline-first mobile apps that survive zero-network substations.

2,400Field technicians onboarded

Sectors

Where technology advisory comes up most.

BFSI & Fintech

Institutional-grade platforms for banks, NBFCs, insurers, and fintechs — proven at IRFC scale.

Manufacturing & Industry 4.0

Custom ERP, shop-floor systems, and vision AI for plants that outgrew their spreadsheets.

Real Estate & Infrastructure

Sales, project, and facility platforms for builders and infrastructure operators.

Government & PSU

Citizen and institutional platforms engineered to public-sector security and audit standards.

Before you ask

Questions we hear about technology advisory

Yes — the blueprint is designed to be buildable by any competent team, and sometimes the right builder isn't us.

Other practices

Next step

Bring us the problem. We will bring the architecture.

A discovery call takes forty-five minutes. You leave with our read on the problem, the shape of the system we would propose, and a straight answer on whether we are the right team for it.

Book a discovery call Send a brief instead

No sales deck
An engineer on the call, not an account manager
NDA before you share anything