Product direction, team leadership and hands-on engineering, working alongside you and your team.
Your company needs experienced product and technology leadership, but a full-time executive hire may not be the right next step. As a fractional CTO or CPTO, I take responsibility for agreed work on an ongoing, fractional basis.
I help founders connect what the business needs with what the team builds, how it works and where to invest next. We agree the decisions I own and the progress we need to make, then work on it together.
When this is useful
“I’m still the person everyone comes to for product and technical decisions.”
You need someone who can take responsibility, work through trade-offs with you and help the team make more decisions independently.
“We keep hiring, but delivery isn’t improving.”
The next step may involve different priorities, clearer ownership, stronger technical foundations or a change in how the team works. I help identify the constraint and lead the work to address it.
“Product and engineering are pulling in different directions.”
You need one view of customer needs, business goals, technical constraints and capacity, with clear decisions about what to do and what to stop.
“We need someone to own product and technology decisions as we grow.”
You need ongoing leadership that can set priorities, support the team and stay accountable as the business changes.
If you need help delivering one defined change, a focused implementation engagement may be a better fit.
Fractional CTO or fractional CPTO?
A fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) leads the engineering side: technical direction, architecture, delivery, reliability, engineering leadership and hiring. This can fit when product direction already has a clear owner.
A fractional Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) brings product and engineering under the same responsibility. Alongside the technology and team, I work on product priorities, customer evidence and how investment connects to business outcomes.
We choose the scope around the responsibility your company needs. Existing product and engineering leaders are part of the engagement, with clear ownership between us.
What I can take responsibility for
- Product direction: turn business goals and customer evidence into priorities, test assumptions and decide what deserves further investment.
- Team leadership: develop existing leaders, clarify responsibilities, review hiring needs and help people take ownership of work.
- Technical decisions and implementation: work through architecture choices, investigate constraints, and write or review code where my involvement helps.
- How work gets done: connect discovery, implementation, release and learning, including practical use of AI across that work.
- Investment and progress: review spending and capacity alongside delivery, quality, customer outcomes and business results.
We select the responsibilities that matter for your situation. The aim is to leave your company better able to make decisions and deliver after my involvement ends.
How the engagement works
Agree the responsibility
We begin with the leadership responsibility you need and the outcomes it should support. Before starting, we agree scope, decision authority, access to people and evidence, my involvement, and the responsibilities that stay with you and your existing leaders.
I work with a founder or executive sponsor who can resolve priorities and enable the agreed work, alongside your existing product and engineering leaders.
Establish priorities and start the work
The first phase produces a practical starting point:
- Agreed priorities: the outcomes that matter and the constraints we need to address.
- Clear decision ownership: what I own, what stays with you and where existing leaders take responsibility.
- An initial action plan: the work to start, its owners and the dependencies to resolve.
- Evidence of progress: what we will look at to judge whether the work is helping.
I work alongside the team to put those decisions into practice. We agree the timing and level of detail around your situation.
Review progress and build ownership
We agree a rhythm of working sessions and progress reviews that fits the engagement. At each review, we examine what has shipped or changed, what the evidence says and what needs attention next. We adjust priorities and my involvement as the work develops.
We keep decisions, responsibilities and the context behind them documented. As ownership moves to your team, we agree who takes over each responsibility and work through the handover together.
Experience behind the work
My experience comes from operating inside Smily, formerly BookingSync: I joined as a senior engineer, became CTO, then co-founder and CPTO. My responsibilities grew to include product direction, budgets, hiring, people management and delivery, while I stayed hands-on.
Two examples from that work:
- Connecting financial products to the underlying systems. At Smily, we connected payment collection, revenue distribution, fees and reporting so that shared infrastructure could support several financial products. Read how the product and engineering decisions fit together.
- Reducing the burden of running infrastructure. Our move from self-managed PostgreSQL to AWS RDS involved balancing migration complexity, operating costs, maintenance and disaster recovery. Read the migration decisions and results.
Working together
Recommendations
Karol is one of the best people I have worked with. I have followed his careers for over the past ten years now and I have watched him grow from someone deeply hands-on with the technical side into a leader with real strategic and people responsibility, without losing what made him great in the first place: there’s a real person behind every technical problem. Give him a messy customer issue and he will quickly turn it into a clear, thoughtful product decision. That combination is rare. I trust him completely, and his work speaks for itself.
Ella Fraase Storm
Chief Customer Officer
Karol has a true “whatever it takes” mindset and a level of ownership I’ve rarely seen in my entire career -when he gives you his word, you can consider it done. I’ve seen him grow from CTO to CPTO brilliantly, combining extremely deep technical expertise with a rare ability to understand product and business challenges. If I were starting a company tomorrow or needed someone I truly trusted for advice, Karol would be at the very top of my list, 100%.
Florian Stenström
COO
I had the pleasure of working closely with Karol on several fintech partnerships as Head of Partnerships. He brings a rare combination of strategic clarity and operational rigor, able to translate complex partnership requirements into product decisions the whole team could execute against with confidence. Karol was instrumental in driving these initiatives from concept to real, shipped outcomes, always deeply engaged and exacting in his standards. A CPTO who genuinely partners with the business side, not just supports it.
Maud Blanchard de La Brosse
Head of Partnerships
Practical questions
Do we need an assessment first?
No. If you already have a clear plan, we can agree the engagement directly. If the main question is what should change, the product and engineering assessment provides an independent view and a plan your team can implement with or without me.
How would you work with our existing CTO or product leader?
We agree the gap I’m filling and who owns which decisions. Existing leaders remain involved, and responsibilities are explicit from the start.
How much involvement do you need from us?
I need an internal sponsor who can resolve priorities and give me access to the relevant people and evidence. We agree your participation and the team’s involvement before starting.
How does remote collaboration work?
We combine scheduled working sessions with written decisions and asynchronous communication. Working-hour overlap and communication expectations are agreed upfront.
What does it cost, and how long does it last?
Ongoing work has an agreed monthly fee. We set the scope, level of involvement, duration and review points before starting. The fee is separate from any assessment; there is no requirement to buy both.
Is this the right fit for our company?
I work with founders of growing product companies, from small teams to organisations of roughly 50 people across product and engineering. You need to be willing to share working evidence, involve the relevant people and give me authority to lead the agreed work.
If your immediate need is to turn a validated prototype into a dependable product, see From prototype to production.
Discuss the leadership your company needs
Tell me where you need help, what you have tried and which responsibilities need an owner. We can establish whether fractional CTO or CPTO involvement fits your situation.
Prefer to message me? Get in touch on LinkedIn.