02
Strategic Advisory Retainer
A senior voice on retainer, for the calls that only get made once. Architecture decisions. Migration plans. Vendor bake-offs. Hiring scorecards.
- For
- CTOs and VPs of Data at Series B through growth-stage companies, Cassandra-at-scale leads planning major upgrades, and VC/PE partners who want a recurring technical voice on a portfolio company.
- Engagement shape
- Retainer, quarterly cadence, 10 to 40 hours per month. Standing weekly or biweekly call plus async review.
The problem
Your team is good. That is not the problem. The problem is that every quarter there are three or four decisions nobody on the team has made before, and getting them wrong costs you a year. A migration path. A vendor choice. A capacity plan for the next growth curve. A re-architecture of a data platform whose original author left two years ago.
Most advisory clients do not need a full fractional engagement. They need a senior operator they can put on the calendar every week, send a draft architecture decision record to on Thursday, and get a straight answer from on Friday. Not a deck. Not a hedge. An answer.
Code is easy. Data is heavy. The decisions about the heavy parts deserve a second set of eyes that has watched the failure modes play out before. We have reviewed more than 100 architectures and keep seeing the same five mistakes. A standing call every week is the most cost-effective way to avoid making them.
What we do
We hold a standing slot on your calendar so the calls that set your next two years do not get made alone. Between calls, you send drafts — ADRs, migration plans, vendor shortlists — and we mark them up.
- Standing weekly or biweekly call, 30 to 60 minutes
- Async review in a shared Slack or email thread
- Written responses to major architecture calls, on the record
- Reviewed ADRs and quarterly check-in summary
- Same-business-day response for urgent questions, 48 hours otherwise
No decks. No status reports. Every retainer is held by a senior operator. We do not hand off to juniors.
What you get
A senior operator available for the hard calls — architecture decisions, migration plans, vendor bake-offs, hiring scorecards. The engagement is available at 10, 20, or 40 hours per month, scoped to the actual demand on your calendar.
Access includes architecture docs, ADR drafts, and vendor calls on request. We join those calls when it matters. We stay off them when it does not.
How it works
Week 1 — Calibrate. We spend the first session walking through your architecture, your current roadmap, and the two or three decisions you expect to face this quarter. We take notes. We do not have opinions yet.
Weeks 2 to 4 — Cadence. A standing call every week or every other week, 30 to 60 minutes. Between calls, you send drafts. We mark them up. If something urgent lands, you call.
End of quarter — Review. A longer session. What did we decide? What is next? Does the retainer shape still fit? If your needs have shifted toward embedded leadership, we renegotiate into Fractional CDO. If they have shifted toward a one-time audit, we scope an Architecture Review. Either direction is fine.
Questions teams ask
Can we start at the lighter tier and move to a heavier one?
What if we need heavy hours one month and almost nothing the next?
Can we share the retainer with a peer company?
Do you sign NDAs?
What if our real need is a two-week deep audit, not ongoing advisory?
Can we drop the retainer and come back?
Let’s look at it together.
Bring us whatever you're wrestling with — a new architecture, a migration plan, a bill that keeps growing, a team that needs a sounding board. Thirty minutes, no pitch. We'll tell you what we see.