A fractional CTO's first 30 days determine whether they can add real value or just slow the team down. This checklist ensures the right access, the right conversations, and the right first deliverable.
Systems & Access
- GitHub / GitLab organization access (admin)
- Cloud infrastructure access (AWS / GCP / Azure)
- Staging and production environment credentials
- CI/CD pipeline access (GitHub Actions / CircleCI)
- Monitoring and alerting tools (Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty)
30-Day Priorities
- Architecture review and technical debt audit
- Security posture assessment (OWASP top 10, secret scanning)
- Engineering team structure and capacity review
- On-call and incident response process review
- Identify top 3 reliability or scalability risks
60-Day Milestones
- Deliver technical roadmap aligned with product priorities
- Establish sprint/iteration cadence with engineering team
- Implement or improve code review standards
- Define SLAs and error budget targets
- Vendor and tooling cost audit with recommendations
90-Day Deliverables
- Engineering hiring plan (if applicable)
- Tech debt paydown strategy with business ROI framing
- Scalability plan for next 12 months of growth
- Board-ready engineering update template
- Documentation standards established
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