What to Look for When You Hire a CTO
This article helps founders understand when to hire a CTO for a startup, what signals to look for, and what type of CTO engagement makes sense at different stages.
Do You Need a CTO for a New Project?
When a Developed but Unreleased Project Needs CTO Support
Fixing a Released but Buggy Product: CTO Signals
Should You Consider CTO Even if Your Project Is Successful?
CTO as a Service vs Hiring a Human CTO
Red Flags When Hiring a CTO
Conclusion: How a CTO Helps Your Business
FAQs About Hiring a CTO for a Startup
Let’s imagine you are a startup owner and you have found yourself in a situation where you need a CTO for your project.
How could that happen?
There are several possible scenarios.
- You want to start a new project, but cannot choose the right technology.
- You have a project, but cannot release it due to technical obstacles that are hard to understand.
- You have a released project, but it is buggy, unstable, and your development team cannot bring it to the level you want.
- You have a working project and a development team, everything looks fine, yet you feel you are missing something when communicating with your developers.
These are common signs you need a CTO, and they often raise the question: do startups need a CTO at every stage, or only in specific situations?
Let’s start from the first point.
According to CB Insights data, 23% of startups fail due to team-related issues, including lack of relevant expertise and tech leadership.
A New Project
Not everyone who starts a new project needs a CTO.
The CTO role for startups, especially at an early stage, depends heavily on the product complexity, team maturity, and business goals. Many founders simply want their product built and released. If that is your case, you may not need a fractional or part-time CTO. Instead, you should focus on finding a proven development team.
Having a CTO is not the goal. In some cases, technical consultants on your side can create more problems than they solve.
At initial stages, CTO responsibilities are usually focused on architectural decisions, technology choices, and communication with developers rather than people management. Let’s look at the pros and cons of having a CTO when starting a new project.
Pros
- You can focus on the business side and rely on your technical consultant for technical aspects.
- You have a go-to person to evaluate third parties, AI platforms, architectural options, or get an answer to a technical question.
- You can better understand and validate what your development team proposes.
- When the developers suggest several ways to solve a problem, you have a person who can make a final, informed decision.
To sum it up, you gain a technically competent partner who can think critically and communicate effectively with developers.
Cons
- If all decisions depend on one person, product quality may be limited by that individual’s experience.
- Software designed around personal solutions may degrade or become unmaintainable if the CTO leaves the project.
I saw a clear example of the last issue in a telemedicine platform called Sihaty. When we joined the project, there was another development team that was building software around technical requirements provided by the project’s CTO — and these requirements were quite exotic.
They included a prebaked data model wrapped in GraphQL, with GraphQL libraries called directly from an Express framework. The development team struggled with simultaneous development, did not have any migrations, and used the same database for development and production.
When we asked why they took such a strange approach, the developers explained that these decisions were dictated by the CTO. However, it turned out that the original CTO had left the company months earlier.
As a result, several months of work had to be thrown into the recycle bin, and we rebuilt the project from scratch using a more traditional architecture.
A Developed but Not Released Project
Another typical scenario when a project owner needs the help of a CTO is when a project has been developed but cannot reach the market due to various issues like:
- Never-ending bugs
- Performance flops
- Excessive API calls
- Hanging screens and pages
This situation is one of the most common technical leadership challenges in startups, and it is where CTO consulting services can bring fast and measurable benefits.
A recent example from our practice was a nice small app that helped users to complete a questionnaire and get gift recommendations. Inside, it had some AI prompts and the Amazon API that provided links to specific products.
The app was small, the idea was nice and simple, but the application was stuck in development for a few years and could not become a product available in the market.
Something was off — there was too much data in the responses, and too many API calls, which eventually led to crashes.
If you find yourself in such a situation, you may wonder how that happened: Why didn’t the developers manage to release the product? Is that because of their quality? How does that happen when a developer does not have the quality?
While this question is certainly important, and it is true that not all developers are all alike in terms of the quality of their work, most failed launches come down to two main reasons:
- The developers lacked relevant experience, hence they invented an unsuitable or overly complex solution.
- The requirements provided by the client were unusual and not realistic.
Please, note the second item. Requirements that conflict with how technologies are meant to be used often lead to problems — especially if your developers do not know how, or do not feel comfortable enough, to warn you.
In such cases, what you need is not necessarily a CTO as a permanent role, but CTO as a service that can help you find the imperfections in the architecture and suggest how to improve it.
A CTO — a person or a service provider — can break down the requirements to show what exactly has produced unreasonably complicated code structures and come up with better ways to achieve your business goals.
For an experienced technical consultant, this type of assessment can take just a few days. And it can save you years of frustration.
A Released but Buggy Project
If your project is live and critical to your business, but it regularly breaks and your developers cannot clearly explain why, this section will give you information about steps you can take.
Here is a recent example. The story started when a message came to our website. It stated:
“We are seeking external support to address significant challenges within our development operations. Over the past 18 months, progress has stalled due to limited engagement from our CTO and underperformance from our in-house development team.”
Note how the author identified the issues:
- Progress has stalled
- Limited engagement from the current CTO
- Underperformance of the development team
The 18-month timeframe is particularly telling. In our experience, this is often when the consequences of poor coding practices begin to surface.
In this case, the customer encountered missing payments. Around 140 payments per day out of roughly 800 total were disappearing with no traces in any logs. The developers did not give this anomaly a proper explanation. Their only assumption was that it all was because of bad internet connection. We immediately told the project owner that it was unlikely.
In situations like this, founders often compare options such as a fractional CTO vs a full-time CTO, and many discover the benefits of part-time CTO involvement during stabilization phases.
Whatever option you choose, a CTO engagement should include:
- A code and coding practices audit
- An infrastructure audit
- Analysis of performance and code stability issues
- Clear recommendations on how to address the most critical problems
Also, you may need more than recommendations — you may need to actually get the issues fixed. At that point, the real goal is not “having a CTO,” but having solid stable software that works, isn’t it?
This way, you are looking not only for technical leadership, but also for reliable developers.
A Successful Project
The fourth scenario looks like the best one, but is it?
Your project is live, your team performs well, and everything seems to work.
So why consider hiring a CTO at all? What are possible risks and will it change the project for better or for worse?
Let’s assess pros and cons of bringing a CTO in a live project that has no issues.
Pros
- You create a point of technical knowledge inside your company, especially beneficial if your developers are outsourced.
- You can make more informed business decisions when your developers suggest several technical ways to reach your business goal.
- If the new CTO fits in, and collaboration with the development team works well, you can delegate part of your daily technical oversight and focus on other priorities.
Cons
- Responsibilities previously handled by your development team may shift to the CTO, reducing team ownership.
- Developers may lose autonomy and need approval for decisions they previously made independently.
- The CTO’s experience may become a limiting factor rather than a growth driver.
- A CTO can still leave unexpectedly, taking undocumented decisions with them.
I would say, if your project goes well and you are happy with the development team, introducing a CTO may add risk rather than value — unless you are confident in whom you are hiring.
What to Look for When Hiring a CTO
First, decide whether you need a CTO as a service or CTO as a human.
CTO as a Service
Like any good service, it should be:
- Affordable
- Easy to start
- Well-suited to your specific problem
- Outcome-oriented and productive
You can engage this service when you have a problem and disengage when you don’t. This is easy and convenient, isn’t it?
You can also use a CTO as a service provider to create a point of knowledge — and it can be more effective than using a single human for the same purpose. A company is a more reliable knowledge keeper than an employee.
In practice, many startups discover that a fractional CTO engagement works better than a full-time hire. However, CTO as a service will not manage your daily operations while you are on vacation.
A Human CTO
If you decide to hire a human CTO, make sure your new technical consultant:
- Has relevant experience in software development and can write code, perform testing, define requirements, and do everything you and your team do.
- Respects the existing technology stack and avoids unnecessary rewrites.
💡 Our experience shows that even buggy projects are difficult to rewrite. Instead of rewriting it is usually better to improve the project in steps.
- Can make gradual improvements in a project that lead to a better product quality.
- Acknowledges and appreciates achievements done by other team members.
- Is eager to teach, explain, and mentor.
Red Flags
At this point, founders often ask themselves how to hire a CTO without disrupting a team that already performs well.
Be cautious if a CTO candidate:
- Criticizes your technology stack before understanding the context
- Does not write code
- Suggests a big rewrite
- Demands excessive documentation without a clear purpose
- Avoids tasks with visible, measurable deliverables on his side.
A CTO should never be weaker than the developers they lead.
Conclusion
Most project owners operate at the business level rather than the development level. This is fine, and this is exactly what drives projects in the right direction. Technical people may not be best suited for the project owner role, as their focus naturally leans toward the technical side of things rather than broader business objectives.
This way, if you are a project owner who looks at it from a business perspective, this is totally fine.
However, you can find yourself in a tricky position when you do not understand development issues that keep coming. In these moments, having a CTO on board can make a big difference.
A good CTO understands technical issues and architectural bottlenecks and can explain them in normal human words. That is liberating.
It gives you the freedom and clarity you need to make informed, conscious decisions.
So, whether you are considering a CTO as a service or an employee, it is worth giving it serious thought. In many cases, it can significantly strengthen your project.
Just make sure you choose the right person or service — one that fits your project, your team, and your values.
Key Takeaways at a Glance
The infographic below summarizes the main situations discussed in this article — when startups start looking for a CTO, what problems typically trigger that need, and how to think about the timing and format of technical leadership.
FAQs about Hiring a CTO for a Startup
Am I hiring a CTO too early or waiting too long?
Hiring a CTO too early can introduce unnecessary overhead, but waiting too long often leads to costly technical debt and stalled growth. If technical decisions are already affecting timelines, budgets, or product quality, it’s usually a sign that some form of CTO guidance is needed, even if a full-time role feels premature.
What if a CTO over-engineers the product or pushes unnecessary technologies?
This is a common concern, especially for non-technical founders. Effective technical leadership focuses on business outcomes, not personal preferences. A good CTO prioritizes simplicity, maintainability, and gradual improvement over large rewrites or overly complex solutions.
Can a CTO help fix an existing but buggy product?
Yes. One of the most common reasons startups seek CTO support is to stabilize an existing product. This typically starts with identifying architectural bottlenecks, problematic coding practices, or infrastructure issues, followed by clear, prioritized steps to improve reliability without disrupting the business.
Do startups need a full-time CTO?
Not necessarily. Many startups benefit from flexible CTO involvement focused on audits, architecture, and key technical decisions rather than day-to-day management. This approach allows founders to get senior technical insight while staying aligned with their current stage, budget, and team structure.
Vadim Kondratiev, team lead and customer liaison at Krononsoft, specializes in guiding complex software initiatives and aligning technology with business growth.