DILAGO

Practice Area 03 · Technical Leadership & Advisory

Technical decisions are expensive.Make them with someoneon your side of the table.

Independent senior judgment for founders and leadership teams: what to build, who should build it, whether what you’re paying for is any good—and where AI actually pays off. No equity, no full-time hire.

Book a 30-Min CallSee Where We Help

Juan José López MartínezFounder · Senior Software & AI Engineer

  • 01 · Plain LanguageFindings you can act on without being technical
  • 02 · Transparent RecommendationsThe best tool for your problem—any affiliate relationship disclosed in writing
  • 03 · Real InspectionBased on your actual code and cloud—not slide decks

01 · Where We Help

Four moments when an independent technical opinion pays for itself.

Each one ends with something concrete in your hands: a decision, a plan, or a team that works better.

01From Idea to Product

You have the business. You don’t have a technical team—or a clear way to build.

The first technical decisions set your costs for years. Make them before the code exists.

What is happening

Give up a large share of the company to a technical co-founder? Pay an agency before you have validated demand? Hire freelancers you have no way to evaluate?

How we approach it

We map what to buy, what to assemble, and what is actually worth building—based on total cost and on what makes your business different. Then we help you choose the route: a base build, specialists, or your first in-house hire, with a profile you can actually recruit for.

What you keep

  • A build / buy / assemble map with costs and risks
  • A phased technical plan you can execute with anyone
  • The profile and interview process for your first engineer
Discuss your product

02Code, Vendor & Due Diligence Review

Someone else built it—an agency, freelancers, or AI tools. You can’t tell if it’s any good.

An independent look at what you have—before you put customers, investors, or more money on top of it.

What is happening

Your agency keeps slipping deadlines and growing invoices. Or you built the product yourself with AI tools and it works—but you do not know if it is secure enough for real customers. Or an investor is about to look under the hood.

How we approach it

An independent review of the code, security, licenses, and hidden debt—explained in plain language, with what to fix now and what can wait. If a vendor is involved, we can take over the technical conversation: either they deliver to standard, or we plan a clean exit. Either way, every account and credential ends up in your name.

What you keep

  • An audit report with risks ranked by business impact
  • Every repository, cloud account, and credential under your control
  • A remediation plan—or a transition plan to a new team
Discuss your vendor

03Fractional CTO

You have developers shipping code—but no one senior deciding how it should be built.

Senior technical leadership at the cadence you need, without the full-time cost.

What is happening

You spend your days firefighting and refereeing technical debates. You are not sure the system would survive investor due diligence or your first enterprise customer—and a full-time CTO means a senior salary plus equity.

How we approach it

Senior leadership on a flexible cadence: we set the architecture and engineering standards—including how your team uses AI coding tools: what gets reviewed, what gets tested, and what never leaves your infrastructure. We review critical pull requests, write down the decisions that matter, and hire and mentor your team until it can run on its own.

What you keep

  • Written architecture decisions and review standards—including rules for AI-assisted development
  • A hiring process with real technical tests
  • A team that grows more autonomous every month
Discuss fractional CTO

04AI Readiness & Digitalization Roadmap

Everyone says you need AI. Nobody has told you where it actually pays off.

A roadmap ranked by economic return—including what not to buy.

What is happening

Manual work, scattered spreadsheets, and disconnected tools eat hours every week—while vendors pitch expensive demos that never touch the numbers that matter.

How we approach it

We study how your operation actually runs and rank opportunities by economic return. Clean data and reliable automations come first—they often recover more margin than any model. AI goes only where it creates a verifiable advantage, and we tell you plainly what not to buy.

What you keep

  • A roadmap ranked by return versus complexity
  • A build vs. buy analysis for each initiative
  • A technical specification for the first initiative
Discuss your roadmap

Every deliverable is yours, written down, and covered by a mutual NDA.

02 · How We Work

Good technical leadership means fewer, better decisions—made early, written down, and explained in plain language.

How We Work Together

  1. 01

    Confidential Conversation

    Under mutual NDA if you need it: your goals, your team, and the decision in front of you.

  2. 02

    Look at the Real Thing

    The actual code, data, contracts, and infrastructure—never second-hand summaries.

  3. 03

    Clear Decisions, Help Executing

    Written recommendations you can act on. If you want hands-on help implementing them, we do that too.

Principles

  • Your P&L First

    Every recommendation is weighed against your stage, cash, and timeline—never engineering for its own sake.

  • Constructive With Your Team

    We look for systemic problems, not people to blame, and leave your engineers with more clarity than before.

  • Plain Language

    Technical trade-offs turned into clear options with explicit costs, risks, and timelines.

Portrait of Juan José López Martínez, founder of DILAGO

Who you work with

Senior judgment from people who have shipped it.

Founded and led by Juan José López Martínez, Senior Software & AI Engineer with 6+ years of production experience. Every architecture decision and pull request is reviewed by a senior engineer.

LinkedIn ↗

03 · Start a Conversation

Let’s talk about the decision in front of you.

Book a 30-minute call, or send a short note about where your company is today. We take on a limited number of engagements at a time, so you always get senior attention.

Common Questions

A full-time CTO means a senior salary, months of recruiting, and usually equity. With DILAGO you get senior technical judgment scoped to what you need right now—with zero equity.

It is the best moment. Advice is cheapest before the code exists, and it prevents the most expensive mistakes: overbuilding, the wrong vendor, or the wrong first hire.

Then that is what we tell you, with the numbers behind it. If an existing product solves the problem at a lower total cost, it is always the first recommendation.

We recommend building only when it is your competitive advantage, when subscription costs at scale outweigh it, or when a vendor’s limits block your operation. You stay free to build it with your own team, with contractors under our oversight, or with us. And if we hold an affiliate relationship with a tool we recommend, we tell you in writing—it never changes the recommendation or your price.

Yes. We trace the spend back to the code and architecture causing it—inefficient queries, oversized infrastructure, uncached calls, oversized prompts—and plan the fixes without risking downtime.

One-off work—an audit, a roadmap, a technical plan—has a fixed price agreed before we start. Ongoing leadership is a predictable monthly fee with no lock-in: you can pause or adjust it when priorities change. Scope and price depend on your case, not on a rate card.

Mutual NDA before any access, named accounts with least privilege that you can revoke at any moment, and a contractual commitment that your code is never shared or used to train public AI models.

Schedule a confidential call

Talk through your product, your team, your vendors, or the technical decision in front of you, with a senior DILAGO engineer.

  • 30-minute video call with a senior DILAGO engineer
  • Mutual NDA available before reviewing code or documents
JJ

Your message goes to the founder:

Juan José López Martínez

Founder · Senior Software & AI Engineer

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