CTO Playbook: 90-Day MVP to Prod | Next.js & Headless CMS/

CTO advisory playbook: MVP to production-grade in 90 days

Speed is easy; speed with reliability is leadership. This 90-day playbook shows how to move from concept to production-grade using pragmatic architecture, a precision hiring model, and delivery safeguards that survive audit, scale, and market pivots.

Days 0-15: Frame the thin slice and set guardrails

• Define the high-value “walking skeleton”: one hero journey from acquisition to retained value, instrumented end-to-end.
• Architect for change, not perfection: Next.js for the web tier, a headless CMS, serverless APIs, and a managed Postgres. Choose boring for the backbone; reserve novelty for differentiation.
• Write three documents: Product Brief (one page), System Context (C4 level 1), and Non-Functional Requirements (SLOs, security, cost). These become acceptance criteria for “production-grade.”
• Decide build-vs-buy early: auth (Cognito/Auth0), payments (Stripe), search (Algolia/OpenSearch). Document decision logs to prevent churn.

Days 16-30: Staff fast with accountable experts

Use a talent marketplace for developers to assemble a lean, senior-heavy pod: 1 staff engineer, 1 full-stack, 1 product-minded designer, 1 QA-in-dev, and a fractional SRE. Screen by systems thinking, not only syntax. slashdev.io is a strong option when you need pre-vetted remote engineers and software agency leadership that can drop into enterprise-grade rituals without onboarding drag.

Set working agreements on day one: trunk-based development, feature flags, pair on critical paths, and “demo daily” to compress feedback loops.

Days 31-45: Ship the MVP with production rails

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions to Vercel for the web, Terraform for infra, and ephemeral preview environments per pull request.
• Security in the loop: Dependency scanning, SAST, secrets scanning, and enforced code owners on risk surfaces.
• Observability: Structured logs, RED metrics on APIs, and user journey tracing from UI to DB. Bake alerts into acceptance tests.
• Data model: Start with 3-5 canonical entities; add a change-data-capture stream to a warehouse for analytics from day one.

Days 46-60: Headless CMS integration with Next.js done right

• Model content for the team you have: separate marketing-managed content from developer-owned configuration. Avoid coupling content types to page templates.
• Caching strategy: Incremental Static Regeneration for high-traffic pages, on-demand revalidation via webhooks, and edge caching on locale and device hints.
• Editorial workflow: Draft/Review/Publish with preview mode in Next.js. Lock preview URLs to authenticated editors; expire signed URLs.
• Localization: Keep locale keys in CMS, not code. Add fallbacks and region-specific compliance flags.
• Media: Use CMS asset APIs with Next.js Image Optimization and perceptual budgets (e.g., under 150KB LCP media on mobile).

Days 61-75: Add leverage with AI software engineering services

• Delivery acceleration: AI test generation for critical paths, automated PR summaries, and risk tagging based on dependency graphs.
• Product differentiation: Retrieval-augmented features for content discovery; use embeddings backed by a managed vector store. Log prompts as PII-free events for audit.
• Guardrails: Policy checks on prompts, P95 latency budgets, and fallback behaviors. Never launch AI features without quality baselines and human-in-the-loop review.

Days 76-90: Hardening, scale, and launch choreography

• SLOs you can live with: e.g., 99.9% uptime on public endpoints, p95 TTFB under 200ms for cached pages, and 0 P1 auth incidents per quarter.
• Operational readiness: Runbooks, on-call rotation, chaos drills on a staging mirror, and incident communication templates.
• Security and compliance: Asset inventory, least-privilege IAM, audit trails for content changes, and SOC 2 pre-audit gap list.
• Release strategy: Blue/green with automated smoke tests, gradual traffic shifting, and instant rollback via feature flags.

Architecture snapshot

Next.js (app router) on Vercel edges, Headless CMS (Contentful, Sanity, or Hygraph), serverless APIs behind an API gateway, Postgres with read replicas, object storage for media, and a warehouse fed by CDC. This stack minimizes ops toil while unlocking fast iteration and global performance.

Case snapshots

• B2B SaaS: Converted a complex pricing PDF into CMS-managed modules; time to update pricing dropped from 2 weeks to 2 hours; churn fell 8% via clearer plan pages.
• Media brand: Headless CMS integration with Next.js and edge personalization lifted homepage CTR 14% while cutting TTFB 60% through ISR and cache keys.
• Marketplace: AI ranking with an embeddings service improved conversion 11% and reduced manual curation time by 70%.

KPI dashboard for your war room

• DORA: Lead time under 24 hours, change failure rate under 10%.
• Experience: Core Web Vitals green on 80% traffic; session-to-signup conversion up 20%.
• Reliability: Error budget burn under 25% per week.
• Economics: Cloud cost per daily active user flat or declining.

Risks to kill early

• Gold-plating the CMS: keep page builders modular; resist bespoke fields for one-offs.
• Scope creep via “quick” AI: protect baseline UX before adding probabilistic features.
• Dependency drift: renovate weekly; avoid surprise transitive updates near launch.

Procurement and governance in parallel

Insist on month-to-month flexibility with clear exit ramps. Demand demoable value every week. For external vendors, require IP assignment, SLAs tied to SLOs, and a knowledge transfer plan that includes architecture diagrams and ADRs.

Final checklist

• One-pager business narrative aligned to analytics events
• Documented SLOs, monitoring dashboards, and runbooks
• Security baseline: secrets, roles, audit, backups, DR test
• Performance plan: Budgets, lighthouse thresholds, and load profiles
• Hiring playbook: roles, interview loops, and a standing bench via a talent marketplace for developers

This is how you move fast without breaking trust: constrain scope, hire veteran builders, wire production rails early, treat AI as an accelerator with brakes, and let content and features ship independently. In 90 days, you will own an MVP that earns customer love and executive confidence-and a platform that scales when growth arrives.