Client Context
Technology, Sydney CBD, with engineering distributed across AU and EU. 12-person engineering team, ~$8M ARR pre-engagement. The client is anonymised to protect commercial sensitivity, but the operational facts and quantified outcomes below are reported as they were measured.
The Challenge
A B2B SaaS company with $8M ARR lost their CTO unexpectedly, leaving a 12-person engineering team without technical leadership. The platform was experiencing weekly outages due to scaling issues, deployment cycles had blown out to 3 weeks, and a Series B raise was 4 months away. Investors were asking hard questions about technical debt and platform reliability.
The departing CTO had taken the only end-to-end mental model of the production architecture with him. There was no runbook, no on-call rotation, and no incident postmortem culture. Two engineers were carrying the load on out-of-hours pages, and one had already given verbal notice. The Series B data room was due in 14 weeks and currently contained no architecture documentation, no security review, and no scaling plan. Customer churn had ticked up to 6% quarterly from a baseline of 2.5%, and the head of customer success had attributed roughly half of that to platform reliability complaints captured in QBRs.
Our Approach
Engaged as fractional CTO three days per week for the first 3 months, stepping back to 2 days for the following 6 months. Stabilised the platform with immediate infrastructure improvements, introduced proper CI/CD pipelines, restructured the engineering team into squads, and prepared comprehensive technical documentation for the funding round.
Week one was triage. We mapped the production architecture from the inside out, sat in on every customer-facing incident review, and met one-on-one with each engineer. By week two we had identified that 70% of outages traced to a single overloaded queue, which was fixed in week three with a focused infrastructure change. From month two we restructured the team into three squads with clear ownership boundaries, introduced trunk-based development with feature flags, and rebuilt the CI/CD pipeline so deployments could go out daily without coordination overhead. The data-room work ran in parallel from month three, with weekly reviews against the lead investor's diligence checklist. We deliberately did not rebuild the platform; the goal was to make the existing platform defensible, not to start a multi-quarter rewrite during a fundraise.
The Outcome
Platform uptime improved from 97.2% to 99.8%. Deployment cycles dropped from 3 weeks to 2 days. The engineering team shipped 60% more features per quarter. The company successfully closed a $12M Series B, with investors specifically citing improved technical governance as a factor.
Customer churn returned to its baseline of 2.5% within four months. The two engineers carrying out-of-hours pages went from a 1-in-2 rotation to a 1-in-6 rotation, and the engineer who had given verbal notice rescinded it within the first quarter. The Series B closed at the upper end of the company's target range, with one of the term sheet conditions — a reliability covenant — explicitly removed during diligence after the platform stabilisation work was reviewed. The new full-time CTO, hired in month nine of the engagement, started with a documented architecture, an active on-call rotation, and a roadmap that the board had already endorsed.
“Our previous CTO left with no documentation and no succession plan. They came in, stabilised the team, audited our entire stack, and built a technology roadmap that our investors were genuinely impressed by.”
David L., Founder
What This Means for Similar Businesses
For venture-backed SaaS companies losing a CTO during a fundraise, the natural reaction is to start interviewing replacements immediately. The better sequence is to stabilise first, then hire. A fractional CTO can hold the seat through diligence, fix the operational issues that would otherwise come up in calls with investors, and write the job description for the permanent hire from the inside. Hiring under platform-reliability stress almost always produces a worse hire than hiring after the platform has been stabilised.
How We Would Approach Your Situation
If you are seeing similar symptoms — stalled transformations, unreliable platforms, ballooning vendor costs, or a board that has lost faith — the first step is a rapid diagnostic. We run a structured two-week assessment that surfaces the real root causes behind what your team has been telling you. From there we build a phased roadmap your CFO will fund and your engineers can actually ship, with clear milestones and measurable exit criteria.
Every engagement ends with you owning the playbook, the governance artefacts, and the relationships with key vendors. We are not building dependency. We are building the technology capability your organisation needs to keep compounding value long after we step back. Read more about how we approach engagements like this on our Project Rescue page, or take the Tech Health Check to surface where your own organisation sits.