Interim CTO for smaller companies in Germany

What an interim CTO does

An interim CTO does the work of a chief technology officer full time for a limited period. The period starts when the CTO leaves or goes on a long absence. It ends with a handover to the successor or to the returning CTO.

In a smaller company the gap shows quickly. Merge requests wait for an approval, and nobody decides what the next release contains. An investor or the board asks who answers for the technology now. The interim CTO is that person until the seat is filled again.

Interim, fractional or permanent CTO

The three models differ in the hours per week and in how the engagement ends.

	Interim CTO	Fractional CTO	Permanent CTO
Hours	Full time	Fixed days each month	Full time
Duration	An agreed period	Open, as long as part time is enough	An employment contract with no planned end
When it starts	The CTO leaves or is away for months	The team needs senior advice on a few days a month	After the search and the candidate’s notice period
What the CTO decides	Architecture, releases and hires, within limits agreed with the management	Architecture questions on the agreed days	The whole scope of the position
How it ends	A written handover and an overlap with the successor	Notice by either side	No planned end

For a small team that needs senior advice on a few days each month, I work as a fractional CTO.

The two handovers of an interim CTO mandate

An interim mandate has two handovers. The first runs from the departing CTO to me, the second from me to your next CTO. The table lists what each one covers for a software team.

Topic	Handover in: what I check in the first two weeks	Handover out: what your next CTO receives
Production access	Who can deploy, and which accounts belong to the departing CTO	A list of roles and accounts, with the former CTO’s access removed
Repository and pipeline	How code reaches production, and what runs before a merge	The pipeline as it runs today, with the changes I made
Architecture	Decisions that exist only in the departing CTO’s head	Architecture decision records with the reasons
Technical debt	Parts of the code the team avoids touching	A technical debt assessment, ranked by the risk to the product
Coding agents	Which agents run, with whose credentials	Written rules for the agents and the checks that enforce them
Team	A talk with each developer about their work	Open positions, planned hires and who mentors whom
Roadmap	What the next release contains, and who promised it to whom	The roadmap with the commitments made to customers and investors

If your CTO is only away, the second handover goes back to them. They return to a team that kept shipping and to a written record of what changed.

Leading the team in between

Between the two handovers I lead your software team as its CTO. The developers have someone who decides architecture questions and approves releases. The management gets one person who answers for the technology in its meetings.

As CIO of a Frankfurt fintech I coordinated four teams: development, infrastructure, product and sales. I carried the product vision through to the launch of financial products. Earlier I managed project teams of up to 20 people with Scrum, Jira and Confluence.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke from Frankfurt, an IT expert for data platforms. I bring more than twenty years from code to CIO in finance, e-commerce and real estate, with cloud platforms and data centers. Today AI agents speed up how I build and transform data platforms. At a Frankfurt fintech I took over a running blockchain infrastructure and later moved it from Azure to another cloud with a failover site. I teach practical work with Claude at Claude Hacker House and work in German and English.