The Full Guide to CTO Outsourcing: Best Tips

Most great Startups are created by creative visionaries who come up with fresh ideas for solving specific problems of their customers. However, it’s not the idea itself but the Digital Product that solves this problem.

Moreover, there’s oftentimes a confident tech professional who covers the back of such an enthusiast. Think of Steve Wozniak behind Steve Jobs or Werner Vogels behind Jeff Bezos. In this article, we'll try to help those of you who might be missing your own Steve Wozniak by walking you through the details of Chief Technical Officer Outsourcing.

On the other hand, an Outsourced CTO can lead your software development team and start accomplishing steps in the Roadmap of your company right away, during the early stages, and while you’re looking for an In-House Partner. That's the advantage of outsourcing — your development processes move and you don't spend your time looking for the right person instead of actually building the product.

With all of the above in mind, you’ll most likely benefit from CTO Outsourcing (it’s also known as CTO-as-a-service) in the following cases:

A good start is half the battle, they say. Having a skillful and experienced CTO during the early stages increases your chances to win this battle and set up the SDLC (software development lifecycle) and Agile-ceremonies within the Scrum Team in an effective and appropriate way from the very beginning.

Let's take a look at some other benefits of using a CTO-as-a-Service in a Software Company?

Thirdly, since you have all the technology tasks assigned to the interim person, you can fully concentrate on finding a full-time In-House CTO, who mostly matches your Startup. No need to hurry up and hire an unremarkable candidate for the CTO position just because you need to fill the spot as fast as possible.

Additionally, an interim CTO can set up the right workflow and ceremonies in your Agile Team without your involvement so you can focus on Fundraising, PR, Customer Acquisition, and other business activities that are crucial for Early-Stage Startups.

Last but not least, they can help you build a passionate, aimed at the result Product Team by conducting interviews with potential candidates, making code reviews, onboarding new employees, performing Scrum Mastering, etc.

Despite it shouldn’t cost you much, don’t forget that they are already busy with their own Projects. Therefore, don’t expect them to be fully focused on your Startup and ready to spend more than a few hours a day to assist you. In fact, you’ll get a friendly advisor rather than a dedicated CTO, which is already amazing but puts some limitations on you.

# 2: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a huge social network for professionals, which means that it provides you with broad possibilities to Outsource a CTO. How?

Well, you can simply conduct a search using the “Interim CTO” or “Freelance CTO” queries. You’ll probably find a few candidates who already had some interim CTO experience that’s relevant to your Project as well.

However, being a freelancer means working on several projects at the same time in most cases. This may lead to the situation when your Outsourced CTO isn’t engaged with your startup as much as you’d like them to.

There's always room for negotiation, freelancers can work on one big project at a time as well, but such matters are something you have to personally discuss with potential candidates.

# 3: CTO-as-a-Service companies

In case you don't want to spend your time looking for the right candidate, there are companies that specialize in CTO Outsourcing.

This option has quite a lot of benefits since they have enough experience in providing CTO-as-a-service solutions and already have proven workflows to ensure smooth cooperation with the client. However, there are also some concerns that we have about working with third-party CTO-as-a-Service companies.

# 4: A Product Development Agency with a proven Record

Finally, one of the most reasonable options in our opinion is to find a partner represented by a Mobile/Web Development Agency. The pros and cons of this solution are the following:

However, we’d like to remind you that all the options above are temporary solutions to cover your needs while you’re looking for an In-House CTO for your team.

Step 2: How to understand that a candidate is a perfect match? 🤝

During your search, you are likely to come up with at least a few candidates to choose from. Eventually, you’ll have to define who suits your project better than others. What is the best way to do this? Hold an interview.

From our experience, we’d recommend you to split your Job Interview into 2 parts: technical and product ones.

The main aim of the Technical Part is to understand whether the previous development experience of the candidate will be useful to your software startup. Possible questions at this stage are:

1. What Projects have you worked on?
2. Have you ever delivered similar Projects?
3. In what fields do you have the most experience? This may be Native/React Native development, Augmented Reality, wearables integration, etc.
4. How your experience can be useful to our Startup?
5. How are you going to set up a smooth workflow within the Dev Team? Notice: we at Stormotion use a particular set of Agile ceremonies that help us stay productive, so your candidate should keep some sort of strategy to use too.

If you'd like to learn more about how our Agile Development is structured, you can take a look at the article about our Project Management Flow:

The second part of the interview — the Product Part — is even more important than the tech one in a certain way. How can even the best Development Guru be useful to you if they don't understand your product and can’t effectively apply their knowledge in practice?

Therefore, you also should ask a candidate for an Outsourced CTO position the following questions (to make sure that they understand your mission):

1. Who is the Target Audience of our Product?
2. What are the pain points of our Target Audience and how is our Product going to resolve it?
3. What type of Product would users prefer: a mobile app, a website, or they’re going to switch between both options from time to time?
4. How do you see an MVP of our Startup? What should it include?
5. What should be our priority tasks in regards to the Product Development as of now?

Even though these questions are responsibilities of CPOs or CEOs as well, by asking those, you’ll clearly see if the candidate is inspired by your mission and suits the position of an Outsourced CTO in your Software Company the best.

Insights from Stormotion: don’t forget to attach an NDA to your offer. This document will keep your "project information" safe during and after your cooperation with an interim CTO.

Step 3: Set up a smooth communication flow 💬

Unlike an In-House CTO, your Outsourced CTO will probably work with you remotely. However, all the downsides of remote cooperation can be easily neglected by setting up a correct communication system.

As the Development Team that normally works on projects remotely, we often have to get the maximum contact with our clients from other parts of Europe and the World using software tools

These are the ones that we find the most useful and user-friendly:

• Slack — to manage communication within the team;
• Skype or Hangouts — to report to our clients (P. S. We at Stormotion prefer Hangouts)
• Trello, Jira — to establish a transparent and clear task management process.