Fractional Technical management in (Africa?)
Between January and March this year, the number of founders (both technical and non technical) who reached out to me or my friends for engineering managers was astronomical
It seems we have reached a maxima. The ratio of senior technical talent available vs the number of growing businesses requiring this talent is now highly skewed.
As we look towards remote companies and the gospel of Japa, a lot of “senior” talent opt for the more profitable path of remote work, fewer continue on a path of management. This trend unfortunately creates a barrier/ceiling in the growth of local engineering talent, as there isn’t much of a roadmap to follow from “older” and more experienced managers; we end up just “winging it”.
Early 2020, I and a couple of people who would later be best of friends, met up to discuss this exact problem. How could we break this ceiling in our respective careers as senior engineers into managing senior engineering talent.
This was the birth of what is now Scalable.
Our mission is clear, we aim to improve on ourselves collectively, pass knowledge to the coming “generation” and in doing this, grow the local engineering ecosystem.
One of the projects we currently have is called Pipeline. It is a peer learning process of senior and junior talent. By working with a “senior” engineer on a few project, a junior learns a lot on their technical process, gain projects under their belt, is battle tested and ready to integrate into a company
While this is currently in the works, we figured the need for another more advanced project: Fractional Technical Management. A lot of companies require but do not have the resources to hire a manager on a salary of $3000 — $4000.
In this case, what if we were able to split a manager’s time between companies? A lot of “growing” companies do not need a “Good” manager’s full time attention, only for the important things around hiring, architecture, follow on review an creating of engineering processes
This leaves a lot more free time on their hands to perform these tasks for more than one company at a time.
How would this look like? Company A is looking to build out a technical team and requires the services of a technical manager, here comes Raymond.
Raymond fits the profile, and has the needed experience to perform these tasks, but his fee is a standard $3000 monthly. Unfortunately company A is still being bootstrapped and cannot afford Raymond’s fulltime services
We offer an alternative; how about $800 a month, for 10–12 hours of Raymond’s time weekly. The average full time working hours is 40–50 a week. Company A can afford that, they still get their Quota from raymond
Raymond is also able to repeat this process for Companies B, C and D. Altogether, raymond earns his complete fee, each company earns their quota from an engineering manager and are able to build out their product.
At Scalable, we currently have a vetted list of engineering managers, with a couple of companies this is being done for. Do you need this for your startup? Reach out to me @bigbrutha_ and let’s have a chat
