Elena Ignatova
Chief Technology Officer
Munich, Germany
My Role
As the Chief Technology Officer of Usercentrics, I sit at the intersection of business strategy and technical execution. My role is to translate our company vision into a scalable, secure, and innovative technical reality by oversee a holistic ecosystem of IT, Engineering, Security, and Data teams, overseeing the end-to-end product development lifecycle, driving innovation, and fostering collaboration across engineering, product, and design teams.
What I love most about my role
I love the puzzle of it. I work in privacy tech, a landscape that changes constantly during a time where expectations around consent, data use and accountability under GDPR, the Digital Services Act and the AI Act. I really enjoy the challenge of taking a messy, complicated problem and figuring out how to turn it into a clean, elegant technical solution.
How I define success
Resilience is the true definition of success and I’ve experienced this first-hand, working in technology where unexpected things go wrong all the time. For example, servers fail, bugs happen, sometimes out of your control. It’s important to remember that success isn't about being perfect, it's about how fast we recover and how much we learn from it.
The best piece of business advice I ever received was
The best business advice I ever received was that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” meaning that a company can have the smartest plan in the world, but if the people inside the company don’t fully support it, the plan will fail.
Another piece of business advice I received is to “focus on outcomes, not output,” aligning teams around meaningful impact rather than activity for activity’s sake.
What would I tell my younger self
I’d tell my younger self to stop waiting until you feel 100% ready, just start and figure it out along the way. It’s better to be curious than perfect.
What 2B Bolder mean to me
2 B Bolder means having the courage to make the hard decisions when the path isn't clear. It means getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s also about leading with conviction and integrity.
Years of Experience
~20 years
I recommend you focus on developing these 3 skills to succeed in a role like mine
Problem solving / Tech strategy
Organizational leadership
Crisis management