I don’t do many posts on fractional leadership even though I am a fractional CTO because you either know what it is or you don’t, but an oddity about any fractional role that’s not commonly understood is that.
Fractionals are behaviourally external, but functionally internal.
And this can be incredibly useful.
If you are a technology business who uses a software partner to build your project, the technical leadership part of that lives with that third party. That means you’ve lodged this critical part of your org’s capability external to the business.
For the partner’s commercials to make sense, that facility has to stay external with them, because they need to maximise their revenue from you.
As you grow, that technical leadership needs to be lodged internally. The odd thing about fractional staff is although they look external (they don’t work for you, they invoice you), they function as if they are internal because fractionals are transitional/interim roles.
The fractional’s job is to build up the capability you have within your org, and make it an internal facility.