Virtual CPTO
Alheimur Carimum takes on the mandate of a Chief Product and Technology Officer as a service. Two named principals, a delivery pod behind them, and accountability that does not end at the recommendation.
Product half
What gets built What gets killed What it earns What the market will bearTechnology half
How it gets built What it runs on What breaks first What the debt really costsOne mandate · one accountable office
Before you read further
Why we exist
Three failures account for most of it. Each one is a decision that nobody had the authority to make.
Platforms get bought before the workflow underneath is designed. The system goes live and the operation keeps running on spreadsheets.
Prioritisation without evidence turns into rework. The expensive discovery happens after the build rather than before it.
No data readiness, no guardrails, no owner, no unit economics. The proof of concept impresses the board and then quietly expires.
A CPTO sits at the seam of strategy, evidence and engineering, and most companies cannot hire one. So the function goes unowned. This is the mandate we take on.
The mandate
Four decisions a Chief Product and Technology Officer owns.
Market & Customer Evidence
Is there demand worth building for?
If this call is wrongA quarter of engineering spent on demand that was never there.
Product & Portfolio
Which bet, and at what price?
If this call is wrongFeatures that add cost to serve and nothing to renewal.
Technology & Architecture
Build it, buy it, or integrate it?
If this call is wrongA platform that cannot carry the next release, found out late.
Data & AI
What does it run on, and can we trust it?
If this call is wrongA pilot that impresses the board and never reaches production.
Plus the calls that rarely make a slide: build versus buy, cost of technology, delivery governance, security posture, board reporting. When companies actually pick up the phone.
When companies call us
Pick the one that sounds like your week. The figures shown are an illustrative pattern, not client data.
Cut the portfolio to what earns. Prove it before you build.
Find the real constraint, then engineer around it.
Pick the two use cases with real economics. Ship them.
Write the remediation plan a buyer will accept.
Hold the mandate now. Hand it over cleanly later.
None of these is solved by a recommendation alone. See what has already shipped.
Selected work
Three portfolios, built for operators rather than demonstrated in a lab. Every system below was delivered under Alheimur Carimum. The platform track record in the leadership section is separate, and comes from the principals’ prior executive roles.
Every build feeds a reusable accelerator library, which is why the next system costs less to deliver than the last. Two people are accountable for all of it.
Leadership
One owns the product and commercial half, the other technology and systems. Between them, the full mandate.
Founder · Business & product strategy
The business thinking behind the build.
Chief Technology Officer · Technology & systems
The systems that make it real.
Two principals cannot ship nine systems alone. Here is how the work actually gets delivered.
How we deliver
A pod, not a bench: senior practitioners plus an AI delivery layer, producing the output of eight to ten.
The pod
3Accountable principals, plus specialist capacity as the work requires
Multiplied by
Output equivalent to
8–10What a conventional team would need
Fixed and outcome-based pricing throughout. When AI makes us faster, the saving is yours. A day-rate model would hand it to us instead.
Nine systems are already codified as accelerators. We assemble from proven components before we write anything new.
AI-assisted delivery is disclosed in the contract. Review, accountability and warranty stay with named people, and your data is never used to train models.
Because delivery cost no longer tracks team size, we can price the outcome. The engagement models are built on that.
Engagement
Commitment rises with proof. Every tier is priced on what you receive, never on hours booked.
2 to 3 weeks · fixed fee
An automated inventory of your code, data and process estate, read by senior architects. Opportunity map, target architecture, costed roadmap.
Per module · milestone-based
A named system delivered against a frozen spec. Price is set on the deliverable, so our speed becomes your saving, not our margin.
Monthly retainer · standing mandate
A standing product and technology office: strategy and roadmap owned, decisions made, with a delivery pod attached to the advice.
Reduced fee + revenue share
For platforms that monetise: marketplaces, IoT estates, allocation engines. We take less upfront and share the value created.
Most relationships begin at tier one, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether the rest is worth doing. Common questions before a first call.
Questions
A virtual CPTO is a Chief Product and Technology Officer engaged as a service rather than as an employee. The role carries the same mandate as the full-time position: deciding what gets built, how it gets built, on what evidence, and on what data and AI foundation. It also covers build versus buy calls, cost of technology, delivery governance, security posture and board reporting.
A fractional CTO covers technology alone. A virtual CPTO covers product and technology together, which matters because the most costly mistakes happen at the seam between them: a roadmap the architecture cannot support, or a platform built for demand that was never validated. We split the role across two named principals, one owning product and commercial, the other technology and systems.
When you need the function but cannot justify or attract the full-time hire. The typical cases are companies between fifteen and two hundred million in revenue, private equity portfolio companies needing a product and technology turnaround, founders still acting as their own CPTO, and companies in the gap between two permanent hires.
Engagements are priced on the deliverable or as a monthly retainer, never on hours booked. A full-time CPTO costs roughly two hundred to three hundred thousand pounds a year in the United Kingdom, or one to three crore in India, fully loaded. A virtual CPTO retainer is priced as a visible fraction of that. Most relationships begin with a fixed-fee diagnostic of two to three weeks.
Yes, and it is disclosed in every contract. An AI delivery layer handles legacy inventory, data mapping, migration analysis, code and test generation, research synthesis and regression sweeps. Named humans review everything and carry the warranty. Client data is never used to train models. Because pricing is fixed and AI makes delivery faster, the efficiency accrues to you rather than to us.
A diagnostic can usually begin within two weeks of the first conversation. Larger builds and retainers depend on current pod capacity, which is deliberately limited because the practice runs small senior teams rather than a bench.
Yes. That work usually takes one of two shapes: preparing a company so its technology survives a buyer's scrutiny, or reviewing a target on behalf of an investor. Either way the output is the same, an honest picture of the architecture, the delivery capability, the concentration risks and the cost to remediate, written so a board and a buyer can both act on it.
This is one of the more common reasons we are called. A virtual CPTO can hold the mandate while a permanent search runs, which keeps decisions moving and stops the team stalling. It also tends to improve the eventual hire, because the role gets defined against what the company actually needs rather than what the last person happened to do.
The practice is based in Bengaluru and works across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, India, the Middle East and Africa, and South East Asia. Engagements run remotely by default, with onsite time at the points that need it.
Nine systems across three portfolios: ERP platforms, inventory management and space allocation; B2B marketplaces and IoT platform harmonisation; and applied AI covering conversational AI, adaptive systems, agentic systems and legacy modernisation.
Get in touch
A fixed-fee diagnostic takes two to three weeks and ends with a decision you can put in front of a board.
The more specific the question, the more useful the first call.
A named principal replies within one business day. The first call is thirty minutes, costs nothing, and ends either with a scoped diagnostic or an honest answer that we are not the right fit.