What is the difference between a fractional CTO and a fractional delivery manager?

A fractional CTO owns technology direction: architecture, engineering team and technical strategy. A fractional delivery manager or lead owns getting agreed work delivered through suppliers, on scope and budget.

How much does a fractional CTO cost in the UK?

Published UK guides put it around £1,000–£1,600 a day, or roughly £3,000–£7,000 a month for one to two days a week. Rates vary with experience and how much of the role is hands-on.

Do I need a CTO if I run a Shopify or WooCommerce shop?

Usually not. If your platform is bought and your agencies build on it, the gap is normally ownership of delivery and suppliers, not technology strategy. That changes if you start building your own software.

How many days a week does a fractional leader work?

Commonly one or two days a week, agreed up front. For delivery leadership, one day a week suits steady supplier management; two suits a replatform or a period of heavy change.

Can a fractional delivery lead replace an agency project manager?

No, and they shouldn't. The agency still needs its own project manager to run its team. The delivery lead sits on your side, holding the agency to the brief and the budget.

Guides

Fractional CTO or fractional delivery lead: which do you need?

Both are senior, part-time and cheaper than a permanent hire. They own different things. Here's how to tell which problem you actually have before you pay for the wrong one.

By Ryan Kirkaldy · 3 October 2026 · 6 min read

If your problem is that work isn’t getting delivered (agencies drifting, budgets overrunning, nobody holding suppliers to what they promised), you need a fractional delivery lead. If your problem is deciding what technology to build, how it should be architected and how to run an engineering team, you need a fractional CTO. Published UK rates for fractional CTOs start around £1,000 a day; delivery leadership usually costs less. Most businesses that buy their technology from agencies and SaaS providers need the first, not the second.

I should be clear about where I sit. I’m a delivery lead, not a CTO, and I don’t claim to be one. I’ve spent over 25 years in digital delivery, most of it running eCommerce and web projects with agencies. This guide says plainly when you need a CTO instead, because hiring the wrong role is an expensive way to find out.

What each role owns

The titles get used loosely, so it helps to define them by what the person is accountable for.

A fractional delivery lead

Owns getting agreed work delivered: the roadmap of what gets done when, supplier management, budgets and scope, acceptance (deciding whether something is actually finished), and reporting to the leadership team. They turn “we need a new checkout” into a brief, a priced statement of work, milestones and a test for done, then make sure the agency hits it. They don’t write the code. The agency or your developers still do the build.

A fractional CTO

Owns technology direction: the architecture of what you build, technology choices, the engineering team (hiring, standards, structure), security and resilience at a design level, and the technical story told to investors. A CTO decides what the technology should be. A delivery lead makes sure the agreed version of it actually arrives, on budget.

An agency project manager

Owns the agency’s side of one project. They’re good at keeping their team on schedule, but they work for the agency. When the question is “is this change request fair?” or “should we be using a different supplier?”, they’re not the neutral party, and nobody should expect them to be.

Side by side: cost, ownership and fit

Costs below are published ranges, not quotes. Contract and salary figures come from job adverts, which show asking rates rather than settled pay, and fractional CTO rates are one provider’s published guide.

Role	What they own	Typical UK cost	When it fits
Agency project manager	The agency’s delivery of its own project: schedule, its team, its change requests	Usually built into the agency’s fees or shown as a project management line in the proposal	One project, one supplier, and someone in your business with the time and knowledge to hold the agency to account
Fractional delivery lead	Delivery across suppliers: roadmap, scope, budget, acceptance, supplier accountability, reporting	Full-time contract delivery managers advertise at a median of £550 a day (10th to 90th percentile £406–£675). Mine is £3,600 a month for a day a week	Several suppliers or platforms, no internal owner, between hires, or a period of change
Fractional CTO	Technology strategy, architecture, engineering team, security design, investor technical questions	One UK provider’s published guide: £1,000–£1,600 a day, or £3,000–£7,000 a month at one to two days a week	You build your own software product, or employ developers who need technical leadership
Permanent hire	Whichever role you hire, full-time, with deep knowledge of the business	Advertised median salaries: CTO £100,000, delivery manager £60,000. Add employer National Insurance (15% above £5,000) and at least 3% pension	The workload is genuinely full-time and you need the role for years, not months

The permanent CTO figure is based on a small number of adverts, so treat it as indicative. The point stands either way: a permanent senior hire costs far more than the salary line once employer costs, recruitment and the months it takes to find the right person are counted.

Signs you need a fractional delivery lead

Agencies are managing themselves. Their updates are the only updates you get, and you can’t tell whether a delay is reasonable.
Change requests keep arriving and you approve them because you don’t know what the alternative is.
Nobody can say what’s in flight. Ask “what are we paying for this quarter, and what will it deliver?” and the answer takes a week and three spreadsheets.
“Done” is argued about at the end rather than agreed at the start. If that sounds familiar, the guide to acceptance criteria for website projects is a good place to begin.
Your head of digital or eCommerce has left, or you’re not ready to replace them yet.
Your technology is mostly bought, not built: a Shopify, WooCommerce or Adobe Commerce shop, a booking system, a CRM, and agencies that look after them.

None of these are architecture problems. They’re ownership problems, and a CTO would spend most of their expensive days on them anyway.

Signs you genuinely need a CTO

There are businesses where I’d tell you not to hire me, or at least not only me.

Software is the product. If you sell a SaaS platform or an app, the architecture is your business, and someone with deep engineering leadership needs to own it.
You employ developers. An in-house team needs technical leadership: code standards, hiring, career paths, design reviews. A delivery lead can run the process around them, but not set their technical direction.
You face hard technical choices with long consequences: building a platform from scratch, choosing a data architecture, scaling a system that’s falling over.
Investors are asking technical questions about the codebase, intellectual property or engineering capability that need a credible technical answer.
Security architecture is a real exposure, for example you hold sensitive data in systems you built yourselves.

Some businesses need both: a fractional CTO for a day a month setting direction, and a delivery lead making sure the work arrives. That’s a reasonable shape, and usually cheaper than asking a CTO to chase agencies.

How a fractional engagement runs

Whoever you hire, a fractional engagement works when the role is written down before it starts. The pattern I use for fractional delivery leadership looks like this.

A conversation. What needs owning, what’s going wrong, and what success would look like in three months.
Agree the role in writing. What I decide, what I recommend, what stays with your team, how many days a month, and who I report to.
The first month: the picture. Suppliers, contracts, platforms, open commitments and spend, written up so everyone works from the same facts.
Priorities and criteria. A short list of what to fix or deliver first, each with an owner, a cost and a test for done.
Delivery, reported monthly. Suppliers managed against the written criteria. One page each month on what moved, what it cost and what’s at risk.
Hand over. The work is documented as it goes, and ends with a named person in your team owning it.

Mine runs for a minimum of three months, then 30 days’ notice either way. A day a week is £3,600 a month; two days is £6,800. Three months matters because the first month is mostly finding out what’s really going on.

Questions to ask any fractional candidate

What exactly will you own, and what will you only advise on?
What will I have in writing after the first month?
What happens on the days you’re not here?
How do you hand over at the end, and to whom?
Have you done this role before, at this scale, with this kind of technology?

A good fractional CTO will tell you when you don’t need a CTO. A good delivery lead will tell you when you do.

Where to start

Write down the three things that went wrong in the last six months. If they’re about suppliers, budgets, scope and nobody owning the outcome, start with delivery leadership. If they’re about what to build, how it’s built and who builds it, talk to a fractional CTO.

If you’re not sure which you’ve got, that’s a reasonable first conversation. I’ll tell you if it’s a CTO problem, and I don’t take referral fees from anyone I point you to. For portfolio businesses with a fund’s reporting clock, the private equity page shows how the same role works there, and the sample documents show what the first 100 days produce on paper.