Nataliia Stashevska is an expert in digital transformation and complex systems architecture and a guest judge at international technology competitions, including the Myronyx Global platform. In this interview, she explains why companies tend to overestimate their digital maturity, which mistakes most often lead to crises and what businesses need to understand before 2025.
Business has grown used to talking about digital transformation as a linear process: implement new software and become more efficient. But reality is far harsher. Today, companies face regulatory pressure, rising cyber threats, a shortage of qualified engineers, and a constant race for speed. Against this backdrop, true digital maturity looks less like a set of tools and more like the ability to make decisions quickly, accurately and without chaos.
Nataliia Stashevska works at the intersection of FinTech, the public sector and security. She consults on large-scale projects and evaluates technological solutions within international competitions such as Myronyx Global. This interview offers an insider’s perspective from the mistakes even the most ambitious teams make to the question of which businesses will survive beyond 2025.
Today, every business talks about “digital maturity.” In reality, this term can mean anything, from implementing a CRM to completely rethinking the operating model. If we strip away the marketing gloss, what do you consider a real indicator of a company’s maturity?
“Digital maturity” is not about the number of software tools or a polished KPI presentation. It’s about a company’s ability to make fast, data-driven decisions. If data lives across ten different systems, access is approved through paperwork and reports are built manually, no amount of digitisation will work.
For me, maturity means that a company can forecast rather than merely react. It makes decisions in hours, not weeks. It can roll out new processes without causing deep internal disruptions. If a business cannot clearly describe its current (“as-is”) processes, it is not ready for change and that is an honest starting point.
You often consult projects in FinTech and the public sector. Why are these areas becoming testing grounds for especially high demands in security and transparency?
FinTech is about money. The public sector is about people.
When something that sensitive is involved, every mistake is costly. These industries have also become drivers of new regulations, from biometric requirements to data storage standards. In the private sector, regulation often lags behind technology, but in FinTech and public services it’s the opposite: technology must catch up with regulation.
It’s a very complex environment; high risk, strict deadlines, limited freedom in architectural decisions but it’s precisely under these conditions that truly high-quality systems are created: reliable, scalable and predictable.
You are a guest judge at several international technology competitions and recently worked with the Myronyx Global platform. How does judging influence your view of the market?
When you find yourself on the other side of projects, you see the core issue very clearly: the imbalance between ambition and reality. Most teams overestimate themselves exactly where they shouldn’t in scalability, architecture, and security.
Working with Myronyx Global gave me a rare opportunity to compare projects from the US, Europe and Asia within a single context. And one thing became obvious: development speed is increasing, but the quality of architectural decisions is not.
Almost everyone tries to “ship fast,” but very few think about how a product will live three years from now. Technological optimism is great, but maturity lies in asking uncomfortable questions: What happens if the user base grows tenfold? Where is the weakest point? How will we recover after an incident?
These are exactly the kinds of questions technology competitions are paying close attention to today.
How do you feel about the market’s rapid shift toward a “speed-first” mindset? Products are expected to launch in weeks rather than quarters.
Speed is not a problem if a team knows how to maintain quality. But in reality, “faster” often means “more expensive and worse.” Today, companies tend to fall into one of two extremes.
The first is: let’s build fast and rewrite it later; this almost always leads to overspending.
The second is: let’s build it perfectly from day one which leads to missed opportunities.
The optimal point lies in between: when a company knows how to define an MVP without treating the architecture as temporary. You can’t build a house on sand, even if you plan to live only on the first floor at the beginning.
What is the one question a business should ask itself right now to understand whether it can make it through 2026 without major shocks?
One question, but a very painful one: Are our processes built around people or around a system?
If critical knowledge lives only in the heads of key employees and work stops without them, that’s not a business process, it’s a fragile structure.
2025 will be a year of instability in the economy, regulation and technology. And those who survive will be the ones who know how to automate knowledge, not just tasks.
