When we step into a fractional CTO engagement, there's a checklist of things we look for immediately. Non-technical founders can't see these problems, but any experienced technical leader spots them in the first conversation.
1. The agency owns your code. You're paying for development but the code lives in their repo, on their servers, deployed through their pipeline. If you leave, you start over. Check your contract. If it doesn't say you own the IP and have full repo access, fix that today.
2. No tests, no CI, no staging environment. Your dev team pushes code straight to production with no automated tests and no staging environment to catch problems. This means every deployment is a coin flip. It works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't, it's usually in front of your users.
3. One developer knows everything. All the knowledge about how the system works lives in one person's head. No documentation, no code comments, no architecture diagrams. If that person leaves — or gets hit by a bus — your product is frozen.
4. The tech stack is a resume project. Your developer chose Kubernetes, GraphQL, and a microservices architecture for an app with 50 users. They're building their resume, not your product. An MVP should use boring, proven technology. Complexity is not a feature.
5. Security is "on the roadmap." Authentication is basic, data isn't encrypted, API keys are hardcoded, there's no audit logging. Security isn't a feature you add later. It's a foundation you build on. Retrofitting security into an insecure app is three times more expensive than building it right from the start.
If any of these sound familiar, it's worth a conversation. A few hours of fractional CTO time can save months of pain.
