Spara
For Zander Pease, Co-Founder and CTO of Spara, building a company from the ground up meant tackling every role, from design to coding. His goal was to hire a seasoned expert who could hit the ground running, not someone who would require extensive management. This challenge was the perfect fit for Go Fractional. While Spara wasn't ready to hire full-time senior leaders across the board, they knew they needed that expertise from day one. As Zander shares “getting to work with a senior engineering leader, a senior product design leader right out of the gate made a ton of sense to us.”
What we did
- Go Fractional partnered with Spara to fill senior-level expertise roles.
- We quickly identified a fractional Product Designer who could lead the entire design function, covering everything from user interviews to product management.
- We also provided fractional engineers to support early development efforts.
How we did it
Our process focused on a key, trust-based partnership that delivered immediate value.
- Understood Their Business: We understood the complexity of Spara's platform. We knew they needed a designer who had a history of simplifying intricate, technical products for non-technical users in sales and marketing teams.
- Leveraged A Trusted Network: We connected Spara with a talent they could trust. The existing professional relationship between Spara's founder and Go Fractional’s co-founder gave them confidence in the quality of the network.
- Integrated Seamlessly: The fractional hire was integrated into Spara's existing tech stack and workflow (Slack, Linear, Figma), requiring no management overhead for the co-founders.
Top-tier fractional talent: a founder’s strategic hire
A founder's job is to hire themselves out of a role, not create more work. By bringing on a senior fractional product designer, Zander gained an immediate advantage. He was able to offload a major part of his workload to an expert and focus on other priorities.
“Having someone senior from day one as a founder means you're actually hiring yourself out of a job, not transferring that amount of work to essentially management of someone junior, which can only be as often just as much work or only slightly less work.", he explains.
This decision wasn’t just about getting work done. It was about securing a high-caliber talent that Spara, as a brand-new company, simply couldn't have attracted and retained full-time.
The fractional model allowed them to collaborate with a world-class professional, even with him living in Spain, without compromising the long-term goal of building a local, in-office team, located in New York City.
Enterprise focus: the right expertise at the right time
Spara’s product is a sophisticated AI platform for the enterprise market. It is a space that requires a specific design touch to translate complex technology into intuitive workflows for sales and marketing teams.
“We were gearing more towards someone that was very good at the enterprise side of things, in particular recognizing that the product that we're building is very complicated for who we're selling it to", highlighted Zander. Our ability to match them with a fractional expert with experience in this niche was fundamental to the partnership's success.
Today, the fractional product designer's fingerprints are on every single product decision Spara has made. Even as the company grows its full-time team, the fractional relationship remains a vital part of its ongoing progress, proving this approach can work for both short-term sprints and long-term strategic guidance.
I've just worked with many product designers in my career and I'm really confident that, especially during the first year of the company, we wouldn't have been able to attract anyone of his caliber to join us full-time.
