A fintech startup that was in its series B funding round, was losing its Chief Technology Officer after he gave them one month’s notice.
The Managing Partners contacted us to validate the different options they had to handle the transition.
Initial goal
- Evaluate the current situation
- Knowledge transfer
- Set foundations for a new in-house CTO
The Problem(s)
- Our initial findings were astonishing: the outgoing CTO was the only one who knew certain parts of the system and setups. Very common, particularly on startups with small teams.
- We have found that there were no clear goals, and the development team was working on ad-hoc mode, as issues and bugs popped out.
- The technical leadership was unclear.
Solution
Have meetings with the outgoing CTO to recount all the different company’s technical aspects and allow us to find out how they are organized.
Based on that, and after the approval of the management, and in the fintech startup industry, we designed two different plans with different goals: long term and short term.
Long term plan: re-arrange the team and help to hire additional people making sure everything is aligned with the plan. We define KPI’s for each role in the company for easy follow up. We also suggested different providers, that ended up reducing their overall budget.
Short term plan: find the perfect replacement for the CTO role. Make sure that the person will have a good affinity with the company’s culture. Have the field prepared with a plan in place.