The house is on fire. You know it, your team knows it, and the longer it burns the harder everything gets. I come in fast, get into the muck, and figure out quickly what needs to change. I'm not the permanent answer — I'm the person who gets things stable and sets up whoever comes next to actually succeed. Most of these engagements run around 100 days. Some take longer. You probably won't even remember I was there, and that's fine by me.
What this engagement looks like
Day one is a firehose. I talk to the engineers, not just the executive team. I talk to the people who know where the bodies are buried. I want to know what you've already tried, what you've already ruled out, and what you've been thinking about but haven't had the bandwidth to execute. I'm not there to suggest things you already attempted. That's a waste of everyone's time.
After the intake, I process. Then I come back with targeted questions, stress-test what I'm hearing, and start to build the picture. There's usually a short list of things that need to stop immediately, a slightly longer list of things that need to change over the next 60 days, and a set of structural decisions (hiring, architecture, process) that need to get made before anyone else can do their job well. We move through those in rough priority order.
I'm in the work, not above it. I'll sit in your architecture reviews, your sprint retrospectives, your hard conversations with vendors or investors. I write things down. I build the paper trail that the next person will actually need. The engagement ends when the situation is stable, the team has momentum, and there's a clear path forward.
How the handoff works
The goal from day one is to make myself unnecessary. That shapes how I document, how I build the team, how I run the search for a permanent hire.
I also surface the hard stuff. Personnel situations, political dynamics, the team members who are going to resist whoever comes next. A new permanent CTO typically has to spend 60 to 90 days just figuring out where those landmines are. I find them during the engagement and either defuse them or hand over a clear map. The permanent hire doesn't need to waste their first quarter poking bears that have already been poked.
When the timing is right, I help identify what kind of CTO the company actually needs next, which isn't always the same profile as before the engagement. The situation changes, and so does the job. Sometimes I'm involved in recruiting and evaluation. Sometimes the right person is already inside the company. Either way, I try to engineer a handoff where my successor has context, relationships, and a situation they can actually succeed in.
Most recent engagement: 100-day sprint, full-time hire in place before I left.