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CTO Coaching & Mentoring
CTO coaching and mentoring for SaaS leaders
What is the role of a CTO in SaaS companies?
The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is a key executive player in your growing startup. Having the right person in the right role is crucial for growth and setting the right strategic priorities.
By being the technical voice in your (management) team, our experienced CTOs ad interim make sure the technical side of your business gets the attention it deserves. This is how we approach executive coaching for technical SaaS teams, and especially tech leaders.
With our CTO coaching sessions we approach executive coaching for technical SaaS teams, and especially tech leaders and staff engineers, focusing on self knowledge and leadership skills. View our FAQ for more details.
To build a software product, you usually need a team with many different roles, for example a CTO, staff engineers a VP of Engineering, or a team lead. The different mindset and skills needed to fill these roles successfully, evolve as your product grows and, to be honest, most of the time you don't need all these roles on a full-time basis.
In the early days, you probably need a tech-savvy hacker type of profile. While after the first successes, the main skills of the Chief Technology Officer shifts towards a visionary and strategic thinker. When the business is blooming, your CTO or tech leader is now responsible for people management, process, and structure. It's very unlikely that the same person can fulfill this role when the business transitions between these various stages. The potential impact of the wrong profile is no to be underestimated.
Want to know more about the role of a CTO?
- →The different skills needed to be a CTO
- →The things we do in our first weeks as fractional CTO
- →What makes a good CTO
- →What is a fractional CTO?
- →How a CTO makes technology decisions
- →The evolution of technical roles
- →How to hire the perfect CTO for your SaaS business?
- →The first days as a firefighting CTO
The Essentials of Interim CTOs in SaaS Companies
Understanding the pivotal role of Interim CTOs in driving SaaS companies towards scalability and innovation.
Interim CTOs are a strategic asset for SaaS startups, especially in periods of rapid growth or significant change. They offer a unique blend of expertise and flexibility that is distinct from traditional CTOs. While a conventional CTO focuses on long-term technology strategy and consistent leadership, Interim CTOs specialize in addressing immediate challenges, guiding tech teams through transitions, and implementing quick-turnaround strategies. They often bring a fresh perspective and can rapidly adapt to the dynamic needs of a growing startup. This role is vital in steering a company through pivotal stages, whether it's scaling up, restructuring, or exploring new technological avenues.
Do you need an interim CTO?
To answer the question, you need to look at the phase your product and your company are in.
Whether you are just starting to refine a new product idea or want to finally aim for that version 2.0, you need different solutions. And madewithlove (with our CTO coaches) can help with that.
The war on talent is hard. Hiring a CTO is a very challenging task. The good ones usually already have a successful career and are not willing to take a leap of faith by joining a new startup. But there are options: you can decide to work with freelance CTOs or agencies that offer CTO as a Service. Or maybe your new CTO is already part of your team, you just haven't realised it yet.
Our CTO coaches can plan out the right strategy to get your MVP to the next stage, or we can help you manage existing technical debt.
Need a near- or long-term plan to scale technically along with the expected growth in usage? Do you need a long-term technical vision? A clear view on how to evolve your team? The madewithlove tech leadership mentors can help you there too with our coaching sessions.
Executive CTO coach and mentors
After auditing more than 120 startups and scale-ups in the tech industry, we've often come to the conclusion that the right people are not taking up the right roles. Creating awareness around these vulnerabilities is one thing, acting upon it seems to be the hardest nut to crack.
Our executive coaching sessions will help tech leaders become better, more reliable, confident and self-aware leaders. If you've been tasked with something outside your comfort zone, we can help. Learn how to assess outcomes, provide ample feedback, create a focused roadmap, and deliver on your promises.
Build trust first
We do this by joining the development team in the trenches and helping the business on a daily basis. With the help of our engineering managers and CTOs ad interim, we can slowly make changes in (technical) processes, be your sparring partner, improve documentation and workflows, and create a better development culture in general.
Train your people
When the time is right, we train your people to take over our role as Chief Technical Officer or engineering manager with hands-on guidance and programming techniques, self awareness, upgraded tooling, and other processes tailored to your business needs.
Navigate the hard decisions
Another difficult topic is hiring or offboarding, which is often uncomfortable and emotional. If needed, we can also advise you when taking the hardest of decisions – letting people go. Internal and external communication is a tricky thing to get right, but we have some ideas and good practices there. Our goal is to make the evolution of your team as smooth as possible with the help of a CTO coach.
FROM 150+ SAAS AUDITS
Fewer than half have structured onboarding
New engineers learn by osmosis.
Fix your onboarding processThe potential impact a better tech leader has on its team is really huge
We help build trust in technical teams, improve documentation and workflows, create better development culture, and ensure tech leaders can confidently take on strategic responsibilities.
We help our clients succeed
You will not see companies like Amazon among our past clients. You will, however, see the names that will soon rock the SaaS world because we helped them predict risks and avoid failure.
“In a short time, madewithlove's interim CTO has noticeably improved how our development team works. The extensive experience and expertise have made our team more efficient and effective. In this way, our team managed to establish a solid foundation for future growth. The…” Read more
Dries De Roeck
Product Manager, Helpper
“CTO Coaching from madewithlove has been a game changer for me. Madewithlove has helped me navigate the challenges we faced as we kicked off the rebuild of our application and doubled our team size. We also work on identifying my leadership style and ensuring team values are…” Read more
Elizabeth Rotunno
Director of Engineering, Lawfty
“The transition was not easy for everyone, but people could see the point and get onboard because of the good technical and human leadership provided by madewithlove.”
Dorian de Broqueville
General Manager, Izix
Jump on a call with Andreas
To check if we can help with leadership team coaching sessions & mentoring. Want us to be your CTO ad interim? Arrange a free, 30-minute call with Andreas to find out how we can help you. There's no commitment, we just want to understand your needs.
Frequently asked questions
We pair you with an experienced tech leader to sharpen leadership, decision-making, and delivery. Sessions are practical, tailored to your stage, and focused on outcomes.
SaaS founders, CTOs, VPs of Engineering, team leads, and staff engineers who are stepping into broader leadership responsibilities.
Not always. Needs evolve as your product and team scale. We can fill gaps as Interim CTO or coach existing leaders until the right full-time profile is clear.
Early on it's about shipping and architecture. Later it shifts to strategy, people, process, and cross-functional alignment. One person rarely maps perfectly across all stages.
Clear priorities, improved delivery, better feedback culture, actionable roadmaps, and stronger alignment between product and engineering.
Book a short call. We align on goals, define success, propose a plan, and schedule the first sessions.
Yes. We audit current constraints, prioritise remediation, and plan capacity, processes, and architecture to support growth.
Yes. We advise on recruiting, performance, and when needed, respectful offboarding and stakeholder communication.
An Interim CTO is goal-oriented and time-boxed, focused on unlocking momentum and transitions. A permanent CTO owns long-term strategy and continuity.
We work hands-on with teams, model the behaviours we expect, improve documentation and workflows, and deliver quick wins to earn credibility.
Yes. We mentor emerging leaders so they can assume responsibility with confidence, tools, and processes that persist after we step back.