"Fractional CTO" sounds like a title on a LinkedIn profile. Here's what it actually looks like week by week in a typical Fowara engagement.
Week 1: Discovery & Audit
We map every system: storefront, ERP, payment processors, shipping integrations, the spreadsheets your ops team maintains manually. We interview the people who touch technology — not just the executives, but the warehouse manager who re-enters orders into QuickBooks and the buyer who can't figure out why their punchout cart is empty.
Week 2: Architecture & Roadmap
Based on the audit, we deliver a technology assessment. Not a 40-page deck — a prioritized list of what to fix first, what to build, and what to leave alone. The assessment includes cost estimates, timelines, and explicit trade-offs.
Weeks 3–4: First Sprint
We ship something in the first month. It might be a critical bug fix, a migration proof-of-concept, or an integration that eliminates a manual process. The point is momentum — the client sees tangible progress, not just plans.
Ongoing: Weekly Sprints + Monthly Reports
Every week: sprint planning, code reviews, deployments. Every month: a report with what shipped, what's next, and measurable outcomes (orders automated, time saved, errors eliminated). Every quarter: strategic review with the leadership team.
What Makes It "Fractional"
We serve five clients at a time. Each gets 8–15 hours/week of senior technical leadership plus access to our engineering team. The retainer covers architecture, engineering, AI, DevOps, and reporting — the full technology function, not just advice.
The clients who benefit most are doing $1M–50M in revenue, have outgrown their agency, and need someone who understands their business well enough to make technology decisions — not just execute tickets.