Telna

Fractional CTO Engineering Turnaround

Telna, a global cellular connectivity platform, let go of its CTO amid ongoing engineering problems, leaving the team without clear process or visibility. Ollon stepped in as fractional CTO, restructured the team, stood up a separate L3 and DevOps group, and led due diligence on an acquisition. Telna's engineering now runs with clear structure, and Ollon supports the new CTO on ISO 27001 certification.

Situation

Telna, a global cellular connectivity platform serving connectivity service providers and mobile network operators, let go of its CTO after ongoing problems in the engineering department. The team lacked clear structure and process, and leadership had little visibility or alignment into how work was actually progressing.

Solution

Ollon stepped in as fractional CTO, reorganizing the engineering team through hiring, promotions, and departures where needed, while establishing clearer processes and reporting. A separate L3 support and DevOps team was created to absorb operational noise, letting the core engineering team focus on deadlines and planning, and a more structured process was set up with the product team for more reliable outcomes. Ollon also led due diligence and technical integration for a company Telna acquired during this period, then hired and onboarded Telna's new permanent CTO.

Results

Telna's engineering team now runs with clearer structure, reporting, and product alignment than before, and the acquired company has been incorporated into its operations. Ollon continues to support the new CTO in a fractional capacity, helping drive ISO 27001 certification and the team's adoption of AI tools including Cursor and Claude Code.

Technologies

Figma, ReactJS, SASS, Node, React-Semantic-UI

Our Expertise in Action

UI/UX design and prototyping

Telna's eSIM portal was built for an earlier stage of the business, and order management got harder as the company took on more corporate customers with increasingly complex data plan requirements. Ollon rebuilt the user experience from the ground up, prototyping new flows in Figma across the portal's core functions, including SIM provisioning, connectivity management, billing, and call detail record review. That design work spans multiple distinct products within Telna's platform, each with its own screens and workflows. The redesigned portal let Telna's clients use new features easily and gave Telna's own team clearer recommendations to make during customer onboarding.

Managed Services and Application Monitoring

Telna's core engineering team was absorbing operational noise and support work alongside its planned deadlines, with no dedicated group handling that load separately. Ollon, acting as fractional CTO, stood up a separate L3 support and DevOps team specifically to take on that operational and monitoring work, splitting it out from the engineers responsible for building new features. That separation let Telna's core engineering team focus on deadlines and planning instead of getting pulled into day to day operational issues, giving the organization a dedicated group actually watching the systems in production.

International multi department coordination

Telna's acquisition of another company meant integrating a new team and its systems into Telna's own engineering organization, on top of already realigning how engineering worked with Telna's own product department. Ollon led due diligence on the acquisition and then the technical work of bringing the acquired company's team into Telna's structure, while also establishing a more structured process between engineering and product for more reliable planning. Both efforts landed under the same fractional CTO engagement, giving Telna one accountable lead coordinating engineering, product, and the newly acquired team through the same period of change.

Telecommunications

Telna operates as a global cellular connectivity platform, serving connectivity providers and mobile network operators with workflows specific enough that they rarely show up in a typical business application, things like SIM provisioning, connectivity management, and billing across large accounts. Ollon's work with Telna spanned two kinds of telecom fluency: designing the UX for those workflows directly, and later stepping in as fractional CTO to rebuild an engineering organization supporting that same complexity through a leadership transition and an acquisition. Both engagements depended on the same fluency in how telecom operations teams think about their own inventory, billing, and infrastructure.

Fractional CTO and fractional technical leadership

Telna's engineering department had no clear structure or process to support the company as it grew, and its CTO had recently departed amid ongoing problems in the team. Ollon stepped in as fractional CTO and rebuilt the team's structure directly, hiring where gaps existed, promoting people already capable of taking on more, and moving on from roles that weren't working, while introducing reporting that gave leadership real visibility into progress. That restructuring gave Telna an engineering organization with the process and leadership in place to keep scaling as the company grows.