Choosing the Right Technical Leadership for Your Stage
As a founder, especially a non-technical one, you may reach a point where building the product alone or even with a small dev team becomes unsustainable. You need leadership. But do you hire a CTO or a Head of Product?
What’s the difference?
- CTO (Chief Technology Officer): Focuses on architecture, tech stack decisions, engineering strategy, and scaling the dev team.
- Head of Product: Focuses on customer needs, product-market fit, roadmap planning, and user experience.
So who do you need?
- If you’re still defining what to build, start with a Head of Product (or product-focused advisor).
- If you know what to build and need someone to lead how to build it — bring in a Fractional CTO (like we offer at SixBerries).
- If you’re building both strategy and infrastructure from scratch, a hybrid setup can work, and that’s often where our Build + TaaS (Talent-as-a-Service) model fits best.
At SixBerries, we often step in as a Fractional CTO to guide both tech and product early on, helping founders avoid hiring too early or too expensively.