Residency · a CTO function beside your team

Keep your lead in the chair. Put tinycto beside them.

At most companies under fifty engineers, the CTO job belongs to a founder or a first lead who does it between everything else. The decisions that compound get made in a thread at eleven at night and nobody writes them down. A tinycto residency sits next to that person. It watches delivery, flags the calls that are expensive to undo, and keeps the written record. Your lead stays accountable. I take what the lessons don't cover.

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The problem

Most of the CTO job is continuous, not occasional. Cycle time creeps. A migration that can't be rolled back slips into a Tuesday pull request. The same outage happens a second time and someone proposes a process for it. Fractional help that shows up once a week sees one day in five. The rest happens in threads.

Agents made that worse. I've watched a team go from 40 to 200 pull requests a week with the same eight engineers, and their deployments slowed down. Work now arrives faster than any weekly meeting can absorb it, and that includes a meeting with an advisor.

So the residency doesn't wait for the meeting.

Who does what

An agent can't own an outcome. The split below is the whole design, not a disclaimer.

The jobtinyctoYour lead

Delivery healthWatches cycle time, build times, flaky tests and review queues every week.Acts on what moved.

Irreversible callsFlags the pull request or thread where a one-way door is being walked through.Decides.

Decision recordsDrafts the written memo from the thread before everyone forgets why.Signs it.

ProcessAsks whether the failure has actually repeated before anyone adds a rule.Approves the rule, or doesn't.

HiringDrafts the role, the loop and the ladder for your stage, not someone else's.Hires.

Board and exec updatesDrafts the monthly written note, with the numbers behind it.Sends it.

Anything the lessons don't coverSays so, and hands it to me instead of making something up.Gets my answer in writing.

What you get

Monthly

Residency

tinycto beside your lead, with me on everything it escalates.

First four weeks: a delivery baseline and the plan that comes out of it

A weekly written brief: what moved, what's drifting, one question for your lead

Flags on one-way doors in pull requests and decision threads, never on style

Escalations answered by me, in writing

Your lead stays accountable. That's in the contract, not a footnote.

Monthly

Residency with sessions

Everything in the residency, plus me in the room with your lead.

Weekly working sessions, async access between them

A monthly written review you can hand to your board

The org change, not only the tooling, because the tooling alone won't hold

Same baseline, same brief, same flags

For when the problem is already clear and the stakes are high.

Who it's for

Founders and first engineering leaders doing the CTO job between everything else, roughly 0–50 engineers.

Teams where coding agents landed and delivery didn't speed up: stacked PRs, slow and flaky builds, engineers waiting on a human for something the pipeline should decide.

Leads who'd rather decide faster and write it down than hold another meeting.

Who it's not for

Companies looking for a CTO to replace their lead. The residency won't sit in the chair, and it can't be accountable. Your lead is.

Orgs looking for an interim manager. I deliver outcomes, not attendance.

Anyone shopping for the cheapest option. This is senior judgment, priced like it.

Why me

I was SVP Engineering at CircleCI, where CI/CD wasn't a platform concern, it was the product. That meant seeing from the inside how engineering orgs actually ship: where builds queue, where tests flake, where people become the gate.

Everything the residency draws on is published here: the lessons, the opinions, the how-tos. The judgment in them is mine. The resident carries it between the hours I can give, and when it reaches the edge of what's written, it stops and asks me.

Where does the time come from? I'm SVP Engineering at Ada and take a small number of residencies alongside that role. tinycto carries the continuous part, and my hours go to the judgment calls nothing else can make. It's the same model I'd suggest for your lead. I run it on myself first.

The thinking behind this

It's all public. Read it before we talk, and you'll know whether we'd agree.

BlogAgents are not headcount OpinionConsensus breaks before the team does LessonReview capacity is the new bottleneck OpinionNobody has to approve the agent's merge How-toDiagnose an AI-forward org in a week

Questions

Is tinycto an AI CTO?

No. Agents aren't headcount, and a CTO is the person accountable for technical outcomes. An agent can't be. Your lead holds the title and the decisions. tinycto does the continuous part of the job beside them, and I take what it can't answer.

What does a tinycto residency cost?

Both tiers are monthly. We set the price on the first call, once we know the size of the team and what we're walking into.

What access does the residency need?

Read-only access to your CI and your repository, and the one channel where decisions actually get made. Nothing that writes. Access ends when the residency does.

Where does tinycto's advice come from?

From the published tinycto lessons, opinions and how-tos, and every brief and flag says which ones it drew on. I review them before they reach you. Anything the lessons don't cover comes to me instead of being made up.

What happened to the diagnostic and the advisory retainer?

They're inside the residency now. The first four weeks of either tier is the delivery baseline the diagnostic used to be, and the sessions tier is the retainer with a resident working alongside it.

What does JP LeBlanc's CircleCI experience bring?

I was SVP Engineering at CircleCI, where CI/CD was the product. That meant seeing from the inside how engineering orgs actually ship: where builds queue, where tests flake, and where people become the gate. Agentic engineering is that same problem at a volume no human review queue survives.

How does JP LeBlanc fit this alongside a full-time role?

I'm SVP Engineering at Ada and take a small number of residencies alongside that role. tinycto carries the continuous part, and my hours go to the judgment calls nothing else can make. It's the same model I'd suggest for your lead.

How does a residency start?

With one conversation. You tell me where delivery stalls and who's carrying the CTO job, and I tell you straight whether a residency would move the needle. If it won't, you get the honest answer anyway.