Fractional data lead

Senior data leadership, part time.

The expensive mistakes in a data function are architectural and organisational, and they get made early — usually by people who were never given the context to decide well.

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When this is the right call

These are the sentences that usually precede the enquiry:

A junior analyst or engineer is making decisions well above their pay grade, alone.
Vendor proposals arrive and nobody internally can evaluate them.
The roadmap is a list of requests rather than a plan.
Hiring is stalled because nobody knows what role to open first.

What is different afterwards

A data roadmap tied to business priorities, reviewed on a fixed cadence.
Architecture and vendor decisions made deliberately, with the reasoning recorded.
Your existing team supported, reviewed and developed rather than replaced.
A clear path to the point where the role is no longer needed.

What you receive

Standing weekly time with the team, plus availability for decisions in between.
Quarterly roadmap and its review against what actually happened.
Architecture and technical decision records.
Code and design review for the team.
Hiring support: role definition, technical screening and interview design.

How it runs

AssessThe current state of the platform, the team and the demand on them, in the first few weeks.
Set directionA roadmap the business has agreed to, with the trade-offs stated plainly.
Run the cadenceWeekly team time, decision reviews and a monthly written update to whoever owns the budget.
Build the teamDevelop the people you have and hire deliberately into the gaps that remain.
Hand overThe role exists to become unnecessary. The exit condition is agreed at the start, not improvised later.

Who this suits

Companies with one to five people doing data and nobody senior leading them.
Founders who need to make a platform decision they cannot yet evaluate.
Teams between heads of data who need continuity.

Engagement: Monthly retainer, typically one to two days a week, with a defined review point.

Questions

Before you get in touch

How is this different from consulting?

A consultant is accountable for a deliverable. A fractional lead is accountable for the function: the roadmap, the decisions, the team and the outcome. The work is continuous and the incentives point at making the arrangement unnecessary.

Will you replace our existing team?

No. The point is usually to support a team that is capable but under-led. Where a genuine capability gap exists, the honest recommendation is a hire, and helping you make that hire is part of the role.

How long does this normally run?

Long enough to set direction and build capability, and no longer. An exit condition is agreed at the start — commonly a hire, or the point where the roadmap is being run without me.

Often bought before or after this

Data stack audit

A data stack audit that tells you what to fix first.

A two-week review of your warehouse, pipelines, models and reporting layer, ending in a prioritised plan of what to fix, what to keep and what to delete.

Data platform build

A data platform your team can run without me.

Design and build of the warehouse, ingestion, transformation and orchestration layers, set up so your own team can operate and extend it after handover.

Analytics engineering

Models and metrics that agree with each other.

Turning raw warehouse tables into a tested, documented modelling layer where every metric is defined once and every number can be traced to its source.

Enquire about fractional data lead

Describe the situation in a few lines. You will get a straight answer about fit, timing and rough shape of the work.

Tell me what is broken.

A short call is usually enough to tell whether this is a two-week fix or a two-month one — and whether I am the right person for it.

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