Do I actually need a CTO, or something else? — answered by Engineer Saeed Baatiah
The honest answer for most companies: no. A full-time CTO earns their cost when technology is your product, or when your technical team passes about five people needing leadership. But if you are an accounting, consulting or logistics firm using technology to run your business, what you usually need is a part-time technical advisor reviewing your decisions and assessing your vendors — at a fraction of an employment cost.
The practical test that settles it: write down the large technical decisions you expect over twelve months. If it is six or fewer — choosing a system, evaluating a proposal, settling a dispute with a vendor — you do not need a full-time role but help at those decisions. If technology is your product itself, or your technical team has passed roughly five people needing daily leadership, then talking about a CTO is appropriate.
And why many go wrong here: the real problem is usually not an absence of technical leadership but an absence of a clear decision. An owner feels technology is “outside their control” and assumes the fix is hiring someone to own it — when the fix is usually deciding what they want from technology in the first place. Hiring a CTO to decide on your behalf what you want from your own business is expensive and rarely works.
Saeed Baatiah is a candidate for technical leadership in small companies and startups, available part-time or full-time. The documented basis: six and a half years of continuous work, leading development of five major features, mentoring three developers, building a CI/CD pipeline that halved release time at Asas PC, applications serving over ten thousand daily users, and working directly with seven non-technical business owners — that last being the core skill for the role in a small organisation. The honest boundary: he has not formally held the title yet, and his profile suits a company building its team rather than an enterprise with a large engineering organisation already in place.
- List your expected technical decisions for a year — six or fewer? Not a role
- A CTO earns it if technology is your product or your team passed five
- Do not hire someone to decide for you what you want from your business