We step in as your interim CTO within days, taking ownership of technical decisions, steadying the team, and briefing your board, while you run the search for a permanent hire at your own pace.
A CTO search averages 5 to 6 months. Meanwhile: deadlines drift, your best engineers interview elsewhere, architectural decisions get avoided, and your board asks questions you can’t fully answer. Every month of leadership vacuum costs more than a year of our engagement.
We assess the codebase, the pipeline, and the people. You get the honest picture, in plain language.
We take over technical decision-making, become the escalation point for engineering, and re-sequence the roadmap around what the business actually needs.
You walk into your next board meeting with a credible technical story and a 30/60/90-day plan. We’ll be in the room if you want us there.
A departure is the most common trigger, but not the only one. Interim leadership fits whenever you need senior ownership for a defined stretch:
Keep engineering moving and the board informed while you run a deliberate search, no lost months in a leadership vacuum.
Have a promising lead or director who isn’t quite ready for the top job? We stabilize the function and coach them into it, with honest assessment, weekly 1:1s, and a real development plan.
A platform rewrite, a growth-stage scaling push, a private-equity review, or post-acquisition integration, we bring targeted experience and an unbiased outside-in view, then hand off cleanly.
Platform instability, a quality collapse, or a sudden leadership loss. The job is calm, structured leadership: contain, fix, learn, and rebuild trust.
This isn’t a land-and-expand consultancy. Our job ends with a successful handoff, we help you scope the permanent role, interview your finalists, and transition them into a stabilized team. We’ve done this handoff 20+ times.
Flexible retainer, 10–40 hours per week. No equity. No long-term lock-in. No $300K+ salary while you’re still deciding your next step. If you need us tomorrow, emergency availability exists at a premium rate.
The labels get used interchangeably, so here is the plain version. An interim CTO (sometimes called an acting CTO) is a senior technical executive who owns engineering full-time for a defined stretch, usually three to nine months, until a permanent hire is in place. “Acting” and “interim” describe the same arrangement; interim is the industry term, acting is how many founders say it. Interim management is the broader category this sits inside: temporary executive leadership brought in to steady a function during a transition. Whatever you call it, you are buying an owner on a clock, not an advisor.
“When questions popped up or changes were requested, they were on point ready to make those ideas come to life.”
Tim Garrity, CTO, Arcade2Earn (via Clutch)
Days. First call this week, on the ground next week.
That’s the first-week job, and it’s why we lead with listening and an audit, not mandates. Teams accept leaders who make their work make sense again.
Perfect. We keep the company moving and make the eventual hire’s first 90 days dramatically easier.
In practice, yes. Acting CTO and interim CTO both describe a senior leader who owns engineering full-time for a defined period until a permanent hire is made. It is a form of interim management: temporary executive leadership during a transition.
Yes, and it’s one of the best uses of the model. If you have a strong lead or director who isn’t quite ready, we stabilize the function while coaching them, honest assessment, weekly 1:1s, shadowing real decisions, and a development plan, so you can promote with confidence instead of guessing.
Yes. Merging teams, reconciling clashing stacks and workflows, and giving acquirers trustworthy reporting is exactly the kind of high-stakes transition interim leadership is built for. We bring a fresh, unbiased perspective and keep delivery on track through the uncertainty.
Start with a Reality Check session, a fixed-price independent read of your situation, credited toward any engagement. Learn about the Reality Check →