01 · The premise
A Head of Engineering "as a Service" isn't a trick. It's a precise craft: build the structure, then disappear.
There's a phase between "the team works" and "the team scales" where structure is needed: career ladder, delivery cadence, on-call discipline, retro culture, hiring loop. Building it while the team ships is hard — we step in right there.
We work as a real collective ownership embedded: pair with the tech lead, facilitated retros, conducted postmortems, hiring loop paired with the CTO or founder.
The Extreme Contract is explicit from day one: at the end there's an internal Head. We identify them (possibly among existing team members), train them, hand over. If there's no exit plan, it's not a healthy engagement.
04 · The contract
Pre-conditions, post-conditions, invariants.
Every engagement has explicit pre-conditions, measurable post-conditions, and invariants we never violate. You know what we need at the start, what comes out at the end, and what we don't negotiate in the middle.
Pre-conditions / what we need from you
- Founder/CTO willing to truly delegate — not micromanage.
- Budget and headcount approved for the next 12 months.
- Visibility on real team problems (retention, delivery, quality).
- Explicit handover expectation: we're looking for a successor from day one.
Post-conditions / what we guarantee
- Team with ladder, OKRs, cadence, working on-call.
- Operational, autonomous, calibrated hiring loop.
- Internal Head identified, trained, in charge.
- Postmortem culture established; key senior retention improved.