We recently connected with Alyssia Maluda and have shared our conversation below.

Alyssia, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?

Coming out of a successful wealthtech exit in 2021, my co-founders and I launched fraction.work in 2022, ready to reveal one of the keys to our success: fractional hiring.

Fractional hiring was our ticket to working with top-tier talent from BIG CORPS in a capital-efficient way. For these senior developers, they could continue with their day jobs while also joining us for startup experience. For us, it meant breaking through talent barriers that would’ve otherwise been inaccessible.

As fraction.work gained traction, our concept resonated, and our client base exploded. However, as our client list grew, it was clear we needed to expand the PM team.Practicing what we preach, bringing in a fractional PM was a no-brainer.

The Process

Whether it’s full-time or fractional, hiring is matchmaking: two parties meet, gauge baseline competencies, and see if there’s work chemistry.

But the prolonged formalities of online assessments or multiple interviews didn’t capture what really mattered: seeing a candidate in action. The traditional hiring process, with its laser focus on LinkedIn profiles and resumes, seemed detached from understanding how candidates operate in a real-world context.

Taking on a non-traditional hiring approach, I got creative. Instead of hours of generic interview questions, I streamlined the discussion to a 20-minute rundown of four core questions on work style to see if there was an initial fit.

But, to be frank, candidates in interviews often say what you want to hear. So, to cross-check, I ran a client engagement simulation. A time-boxed 30-minute role-play exercise helped me see how well a candidate could interpret a mock client’s MVP goals, and how they translated this onto a Jira board. Which feature takes priority? What details make it into the requirements? How do they tackle pushback?

In under an hour of interview time, we identified the best candidate with the right blend of experience and flexibility to rock the role of a fractional PM.

Reflections

Fractional work by nature is non-traditional, so I needed to take a non-traditional approach to find a candidate who could work within this paradigm. This approach uncovered seasoned team players who could not only walk the talk but also roll with the punches of working at a startup.

Thanks to our unconventional hiring approach, I’ve grown my team to include 3 fractional PMs who are crushing it! If I were to do it over again, I would incorporate the client simulation exercise even earlier in the hiring process.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I definitely have a non-traditional background. I studied international politics in undergrad, then worked at a sports agency, and then landed in wealthtech with a thriving startup that exited in 2021.

As employee #9 at the startup, I wore many hats and gained hands-on experience with almost every facet of the business. It’s true you learn more by doing than by planning to do, and this sentiment resonated for the company and team. That attitude was one factor that helped us exit.

After the exit, I moved to Malaysia where I applied my start-up learnings to building an overseas investment promotion team (akin to running a startup). By the time our project wrapped up, I was ready to come home and get back into the startup game.

I reunited with my wealthtech colleagues Praveen + Jeff and together we launched fraction.work in August 2022. Fraction came out of our lived experience – as a young startup, we needed access to top developer talent but in the early days, we couldn’t afford full-time developers.

Our solution: fractional developers.

Hiring developer talent was hard and we didn’t want to shoulder the risk of partnering with hit-or-miss freelance or offshore talent. Rather than compromise, we hired senior developers who already had full-time roles at BIG CORPs but had the capacity + talent to contribute part-time to our startup.

We hired our first fractional developer to build integrations with software partners. We expanded our dev team, and our fractional developers-built integrations, PDF Output, UI Components, and automated testing. They stayed with us for 8 years + through our exit. At exit in 2021, the engineering team included 7 full-time and 5 fractional engineers.

Fractional developers solved our talent shortage + helped us reach our 2021 exit, so we built fraction.work to help other growing software companies facing the same issue.

Through fraction.work, we’ve had the opportunity to help almost 100 clients across a variety of tech stacks. Some of our most notable engagements include launching an AI-enabled brand marketing solution, building a logistics management MVP, and delivering a custom-built financial risk management solution.

But what I’m most proud of is our launch of Emerging Founders by Fraction, where we supported underrepresented founders with office space at Atlanta Tech Village. By creating a space for these founders, we strove to foster an innovative + collaborative ecosystem driven by diverse perspectives.

How’d you meet your business partner?

At work! I joined the wealthtech startup as employee #9. Praveen was co-founder/CTO/CEO and Jeff was growing the sales team. It was my first role working in software, but joining the team at this growth stage allowed me to grow into customer support and product roles.

Following the exit in 2021, we parted ways for a bit. In 2022, Praveen, Jeff, and I got back together to bring fractional work to market, and here we are!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think living the experience of building a fractional dev team + taking that team to a successful nine-figure exit has resonated with our audience.

We understand how to identify which developers will be successful in a fractional role, and how to integrate fractional developers within the larger team to make an impact. Every software developer role requires technical competencies and communication skills, but to be a successful fractional developer both the technical + interpersonal skills need to be 10x quality.

That’s what we looked for in our hiring, and it’s the same lenses we apply to hiring for our clients. Since our launch in 2022, we’ve helped almost 100 clients onboard fractional developers to help bring MVPs to life, scale products, and pivot to build something new.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hirefraction.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssia-maluda/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/hirefraction
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hirefraction