§ OFFER 02 — DELIVERY SPRINT · 4–8 WEEKS · FIXED SCOPE

CTO Consulting and Technical Advisory

A short, focused engagement against one specific problem. Three packages — pick the one that fits.

Who
Led by the founder, hands-on for the duration.
Timeline
4–8 weeks
Request a call What you get

What you're seeing

You already know what the problem is and it has been on the roadmap for two quarters.
Usually means It is not a knowledge gap, it is a capacity one. Work that everyone agrees on and nobody starts is usually competing with feature delivery and losing every sprint.
An enterprise deal is waiting on a certification and the date is now in a contract.
Usually means The work has a deadline that did not come from engineering. That changes the right shape of engagement — a fixed scope with a date beats an open-ended improvement effort.
Delivery metrics are bad and the team has already agreed on the fix.
Usually means Diagnosis is done. What is missing is someone to run the rebuild without also carrying the sprint, which is the specific thing a fixed-scope engagement buys.
You want to see how an outside team works before committing to a quarter of them.
Usually means A reasonable thing to want, and the reason this shape exists. A four-to-eight-week engagement with a defined outcome is a real piece of work and a real audition at the same time.
The hiring loop is producing candidates nobody wants to make an offer to.
Usually means The loop is filtering on the wrong signal, or the sourcing is upstream of the problem. Either way it is bounded work with a visible finish line — offers going out.

What you get

Fixed scope. Everything below is in the engagement, not an upsell.

Deliverable What it means
Velocity Rebuild · 6 weeks Reset of engineering process: rituals, PR flow, deployment, observability minimum. Outcome: measurable lift in delivery metrics by end of sprint.
Compliance Kickoff · 8 weeks From zero to compliance-ready state: policies, controls, evidence pipeline, vendor review. Outcome: hand-off to the auditor in a ready state.
Hiring Pipeline Sprint · 4 weeks Job descriptions, sourcing playbook, interview-loop redesign, interviewer training. Outcome: offer-ready candidates in the pipeline.

The capabilities behind it Process Rebuild · Delivery Metrics · Architecture Review · CI/CD Pipeline · Discovery Sprint

One problem, a date, a fixed price

The engagement is four to eight weeks against exactly one acute problem, with the scope written down and a price that does not move.

That constraint is doing most of the work. Companies at this stage typically have three problems they can name and the capacity to fix none of them, because each one competes with feature delivery and loses every sprint. What a fixed scope buys is not expertise — you may well have that already — it is a piece of work that is somebody’s only job for two months and finishes on a stated date.

The corollary is that this is the wrong shape if you cannot yet name the problem. Diagnosis and execution are different engagements, and running the second before the first is how a quarter disappears into a rebuild that addressed a symptom.

The three packages

Velocity Rebuild, six weeks. Rituals, pull request flow, deployment cadence, and an observability minimum. It starts with a baseline pulled from the repository and ends with the same measurement taken again. Most of the lift comes from review latency and unplanned work rather than from anything anyone would call engineering.

Compliance Kickoff, eight weeks. Policies, controls, the evidence pipeline and vendor review, from wherever you are now to a state an auditor can start from. Eight weeks rather than six because evidence collection needs to have been running for a while before it is credible.

Hiring Pipeline Sprint, four weeks. Role definitions, sourcing, an interview loop that measures something, and interviewer calibration. It ends with offer-ready candidates in the pipeline and your own interviewers running the loop.

Where two of these apply, we sequence them. Running two in parallel over eight weeks reliably produces two engagements that are each seventy per cent done.

What fixed scope actually means

It means we will say no to good ideas during the engagement.

Adjacent work turns up in every sprint — a legitimate improvement, obviously worth doing, adjacent to what was agreed. Absorbing it is the friendly answer and it is how fixed-scope engagements finish late. So it becomes a change order with its own price and date, or it goes on the list we hand over at the end.

It also means the price is set before we start rather than discovered. Where the starting state is unclear enough that we cannot quote honestly, we will say so and suggest the Engineering Audit first — five days is cheaper than a mis-scoped sprint by a wide margin.

Where it leads

A sprint is complete on its own. Documentation is a deliverable, the outcome is verified against a baseline, and walking away at the end is a legitimate result.

Two things follow it often enough to name. Where the finding is that the leadership seat itself needs filling rather than one problem needing solving, that is a retainer. Where a company comes out of a sprint and decides the whole operating model needs rebuilding — usually ahead of a funding event — that is Delivery Implementation, which we only sell to clients who have already worked with us.

How it runs

  1. Scoping + Baseline

    • Workshop with founder + technical lead
    • Baseline metrics pull (velocity, controls, pipeline)
    • Day-by-day sprint plan signed

  2. Execution + Mid-Sprint Review

    • Hands-on implementation (rituals, controls, interviews)
    • Mid-sprint review with founder
    • Metrics check vs. baseline

  3. Handover or Continued Execution

    • Documentation handed over
    • Outcome verified against baseline
    • Decision: walk-away, change order, or move to Retainer

Total duration

4–8 weeks

Phases

3

Deliverables

3 items

Engagement

standalone

How this is priced

Model

Fixed scope

A fixed price against a written scope and a date, agreed before the engagement starts. Billed on signature and at completion rather than by the hour, and the price does not move unless the scope does.

Fixed The scope, the price and the finish date. A mid-sprint review against the baseline is part of every package, and anything added during the engagement is a change order with its own price and date rather than an absorbed cost.

What moves it

  • Which package: velocity, compliance readiness, or the hiring pipeline
  • The size of the estate the work touches — one team or several
  • Whether your engineers execute alongside us or we run it and hand over
  • The starting state, which the audit or a discovery call establishes before we quote

Next step

Describe the situation and we'll tell you whether this is the right shape.

Request a call

How we decide

  • One problem per engagement

    Costs Companies usually have three, and picking one means two go untouched for two months.

    A sprint that carries three problems finishes none of them, and the reason is not effort — it is that each one needs a different set of people paying attention. Sequencing them is slower on paper and faster in practice.

  • Scope is fixed, and a change is a change order

    Costs It makes us say no during an engagement, sometimes to something worth doing.

    Fixed scope is the only reason a fixed price is honest. The alternative is an engagement that quietly absorbs adjacent work and finishes late, which costs the client more than the change order would have and damages the thing they were actually buying — a date.

  • There is a baseline measurement before anything changes

    Costs It spends the first days of a short engagement on measurement rather than on visible work.

    Without a baseline, the outcome of a velocity engagement is an opinion held by whoever is most invested in it. With one, the end of the sprint is a number next to another number. It is also the only way you can hold us to the claim.

  • Documentation is a deliverable, not a courtesy

    Costs It costs real days out of four to eight weeks.

    The engagement is short by design and we leave. Anything living only in our heads leaves with us, which turns a fixed-scope sprint into a dependency — the opposite of what a fixed scope is for.

Sprint, retainer, or a full rebuild

Three shapes of engagement, and the choice is mostly about how well-defined the problem already is.

Engagement When it fits Length How it ends
Engineering Audit You do not yet know which problem to solve Five days A ranked diagnosis and a ninety-day plan
CTO Consulting sprint One problem, well defined, with a date on it Four to eight weeks, fixed scope The outcome verified against a baseline, then handover
Fractional CTO retainer The technical leadership seat itself is empty Three-month minimum, monthly thereafter A permanent leader starts, or the problem closes
Delivery Implementation Engineering operations need rebuilding end to end Six months, milestone-billed Handover to permanent technical leadership

The common mistake is buying the third row when the second would have done. A retainer is the right instrument for an empty seat and an expensive one for a bounded problem.

Is this you?

  • Companies with one well-defined acute pain (velocity, compliance readiness, or hiring)
  • Teams that already know what to do and want fixed-scope execution
  • Companies that want to see how we work before committing to a retainer

What Our Clients Say

"We tried two fractional CTOs before. Both wrote slide decks. Oleksandr ran our PR queue, sat in code review, and rebuilt our hiring loop in 6 weeks. Velocity is up 40%, and we're auditor-ready by next quarter."

Founder

Founder at RevOps SaaS · name available after NDA

Frequently Asked Questions

Senior engineering leadership brought in against a specific problem rather than a permanent seat. In practice it means someone who has run delivery at this stage taking a defined piece of work — velocity, compliance readiness, a hiring loop — and finishing it inside a fixed scope. It differs from advisory in that the work ships rather than being recommended.
Yes, if the problem is genuinely well defined and you can say what has to be true at the end. If you cannot, the audit costs a fraction of a sprint and prevents the more expensive mistake, which is running four to eight weeks in the wrong direction with everyone agreeing enthusiastically.
By what the deadline came from. A certification date in a customer contract points at Compliance Kickoff. A board conversation about shipping rate points at Velocity Rebuild. Open senior roles that are not closing point at the Hiring Pipeline Sprint. Where two apply, we sequence them rather than run both.
It becomes a change order with its own price and date. That is not administrative rigidity — a fixed price is only honest if the scope behind it is fixed, and an engagement that quietly absorbs extra work finishes late, which costs you the one thing you were buying.
There is a baseline measurement in the first days, before anything changes, and the same measurement at the end. For velocity that is delivery metrics from the repository; for hiring it is offers going out; for compliance it is the auditor-readiness checklist. The comparison is the deliverable, not a summary of what we did.
Senior engineers assembled for the engagement, working under the founder, who stays hands-on for the duration. Names and backgrounds are available after NDA. Nobody is billed against your project who is not on it.
Often, and that is fine as long as it is not the point. The engagement is scoped to be complete on its own, with documentation and a verified outcome, so walking away at the end is a legitimate result rather than an unfinished one.

Sources

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