What level of CTO does your company actually need?

Hiring a CTO by title alone is a gamble. The same title covers a solo programmer shipping the first version and an executive running technology for a 400-person organization. Those are different jobs, with different skills, different budgets, and different failure modes. Hire the first kind when you need the second and your team drowns. Hire the second kind when you need the first and you get an expensive operator who does not build anything. I have watched both mistakes happen, and the fix is simple: match the CTO to the stage of the company.

Two numbers set the level

The CTO Levels™ framework does this with two numbers: how many people report up into the CTO, and the annual budget for that team. Find those two numbers on the grid and you get the level the company should be operating at. Then you assess where the team operates, across four areas the framework calls Sentinels (Speed, Stretch, Shield, Sales), and you write an action plan to close the gap. The framework was created by Etienne de Bruin with Kathy Keating and Scott Graves, and the full grid lives at ctolevels.com.

Budgets and team sizes are approximate, per the framework.

Where I sit

On the CTO Levels™ framework I classify at Level 7. That is the innovation level, around a 100-person technology team, and a pure Level 7 carries every level below it. I have done the day-zero work (first version, first hires, first customers) and every stage after it up to a hundred people: delivery under pressure, building teams, protecting the org, tightening operations. What clients get from me is a CTO who still builds: architecture, AI systems doing real work, hiring and growing the team, and the judgment to decide what to build and what to buy.

For a company hiring me as a fractional CTO, I operate between Level 1 and Level 7. That is the scope of the engagement. In my own businesses I work across all ten levels, and a full-time role is a different conversation. The fractional boundary is about time and presence. I do not want a massive organization with a large operational budget and no building left to do, and I do not do board politics. If your company is growing from its first engineers toward a technology team of around a hundred, that is where I work best.

Find your level

Grab your two numbers: the team size that reports into the CTO role, and the annual budget for that team. Find the row. Then ask where your team operates today, honestly. If the row says Level 3 and your team is still acting like Level 1, a more impressive title will not close it. The Level 3 work closes it: delivery, test automation, lightweight approvals. If the row says Level 7 and your CTO is still the only person who can ship, you have a gap, and the gap has a name.

If your row falls between 1 and 7 and you want a CTO who builds, that is the work I do as a fractional CTO. Tell me about your needs and we can look at your two numbers together.

There is a climbing analogy I keep coming back to. A climber going solo climbs a route below their hardest grade, not because they climb it lazily, but because there is no rope and no partner to catch a fall, so the focus is total. Fractional CTO work is the same. I am on my own, a day or two a week, and I work with full focus, full intention, and full energy at whatever level I take on. The margin is in the scope I take on. With that full focus, the best deal for a company hiring me as a fractional CTO is between Level 1 and Level 7. Levels 8 to 10 are honest full-time jobs, and a full-time job is not fractional work.

CTO Levels™ is a framework by Etienne de Bruin, with Kathy Keating and Scott Graves. The grid and the level names are theirs; I use them to describe where I work. Learn more at ctolevels.com.