### Harnessing Experience at a Fraction of the Cost  
_March 3, 2023_  
_Jason Cole_  
[Harnessing Experience at a Fraction of the Cost](/content/blog/2023/3/3/harnessing-experience-at-a-fraction-of-the-cost/index.html)  
  
As a startup, one of the most important decisions you can make is ensuring you have access to experienced technical leadership. While hiring a full-time CTO can be expensive, there’s a better alternative than going it alone: the fractional CTO.

### Five Years of Giving Dangerously  
_November 21, 2022_  
_Jason Cole_  
[Five Years of Giving Dangerously](/content/blog/2022/11/21/five-years-of-giving-dangerously/index.html)

### Who Cares if it Scales?  
_October 18, 2022_  
_Product Development, Startup Life_  
_Jason Cole_  
[Who Cares if it Scales?](/content/blog/2022/10/18/who-cares-if-it-scales/index.html)  
  
Across the country, in every accelerator, exec team meeting, advisor session, and board meeting, startups are asked the same question:

**“But how will it scale?”**  
  
My answer: **“Who cares?”**

### Startups: You Don’t Need a CTO (Yet)  
_October 6, 2017_  
_Leadership, Startup Life_  
_Jason Cole_  
[Startups: You Don’t Need a CTO (Yet)](/content/blog/2017/10/6/startups-you-dont-need-a-ctoyet/index.html)

### In Defense of the Plan, Part 2  
  
I [wrote recently](/content/blog/2019/6/13/in-defense-of-the-plan-part-1/index.html) about the need for long-term planning, even (perhaps especially) in an Agile development environment. I left you with a choice: plan or fail.  
  
The fun part about writing on the internet is that you don’t really have to solve problems: you just have to point them out so that other people can agree with you that yes, there is a problem there, and someone should do something about it. I’m a problem-solver by nature, though, so I can’t just leave it at that. If I’m going to tell people they need to do something, then I’m constitutionally required to help them do it. So we’ve already covered _why_ you need a plan for your product development. Let’s talk about _how_.  
  
Let’s start with a few objections, because I never met a straw man I didn’t like (to poke holes in):  
  
1. “I can’t tell you when we’ll have a whole feature set done because we’re using Scrum/Kanban/Lean Agile/some other Japanese-sounding development process.”  
2. “I can’t plan because I don’t know how long it will take to build something six months from now.”  
3. “I can’t create a release plan because I don’t want executives to see it and think that my team has committed to specific deliveries way out in the future, where all the uncertainty lies.”

Let’s take these in order…