Fractional CTO services

A fractional CTO works with your company part time, CTO as a service delivers the same role through a company, and a full-time CTO is employed inside it. The executive who owns a company's technology can take one of three forms:

• Fractional CTO: an experienced technical leader who works with your company part time. They set the technical direction, decide on the architecture and guide the engineers, but they are not a full-time employee.
• CTO as a service: the same role delivered by a company instead of by one person.
• Full-time CTO: a technical leader employed inside your company.

Startups and scale-ups without a technical leader look at the first two when a full-time hire is not the right step yet. These are the definitions the market uses. Our model is the second one: Order Group delivers the role as a company. Our CTO and a Project Tech Leader take it in a project our own team builds, so the person who sets the architecture works next to the engineers who write the code.

A company needs a CTO when technical decisions start to shape the business and nobody owns them. You can see it in a few places:

• A product has to be built, and its architecture is still open.
• Estimates arrive, and the business side cannot verify them.
• Technical risks live in people's heads instead of in the plan.
• The team writes code without agreed standards or a review process.
• Decisions about technical solutions stall because nobody has the last word.

Each of these is a duty of the role, and in our projects the Project Tech Leader holds them.

The entry point is a free discovery workshop, run by the engineers who later build the product. It ends with a brief, a budget and a technical plan, which covers the MVP scope, a roadmap and an estimate of cost, time and team composition. You can read more on the page about our consulting and discovery services and on the discovery workshop.

Skyfri shows what the start looks like. The collaboration opened with a Technical Feasibility Study in November 2023: market analysis, a feasibility study and a technical specification. Architecture and the implementation of the energy management system followed, and the solution went into production in June 2024.

During the build we work in your tools if you prefer. At Skyfri that means MS Teams, Slack and the client's Jira. At KYOTO it was Slack and the client's Jira. You get a monthly report of the time worked. Sprints, reviews and demos are described on the how we work page.

Three projects show the technical role in practice:

• Skyfri. Architecture: a new IoT system based on Azure IoT Hub and Edge, built with React, Python asyncIO and Databricks. The energy management system (EMS) steers 7 plants with more than 5 MWh of storage and more than 4 MW of battery power. Read the Skyfri case study; it sits in our energy software hub.
• KYOTO (Norway). Product development ran from January to December 2024. It was billed in time and material and run in Scrum. The scope covered cloud infrastructure in AWS, a planning and simulation platform, a battery management system and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) dashboards. Maciej Sułek, Co-founder & CTO, was the Project Tech Leader. Read the KYOTO case study.
• Mudita. An app store for the Mudita Kompakt phone and a platform for over-the-air (OTA) updates of Mudita phones. Maciej Sułek has been the Project Tech Leader since July 2022 and prepared the technical requirements himself.

The CTO role is played by Maciej Sułek, our Co-founder & CTO, together with the Project Tech Leader of each project. Maciej co-founded Order Group in 2013 and in the first years of the company led projects as a tech lead. You can read his profile on the expert page.

Our CTO appoints the Project Tech Leader of each project in agreement with the heads of the frontend and backend teams. That person takes part in the meetings with you and works next to the engineers who run the discovery workshop and build the product afterwards.

Order Group is a software house from Warsaw (Chmielna 25, 00-021 Warsaw). Since 2013 we have delivered 160+ projects in 15+ industries, and clients rate us 5.0/5 on Clutch, based on 18 verified reviews.

We bill in time and material by default, which means you pay for the time actually worked. A fixed price is possible when the scope is closed. The size of the project sets the cost, so we estimate it with you in the free discovery workshop.

You can also write through the contact form and get an answer within 48 hours on working days. Related services: custom software, cloud platforms and the nearshore model.