Inside Sigli: A Conversation with Max Golikov, Chief Business Development Officer

Welcome to this exclusive interview with Max Golikov, CBDO at Sigli. He’s spent more than 18 years building tools that make life easier for franchises, agencies, and businesses trying to stand out online.

Max plays a key role in driving the company’s impressive growth and shaping its business-centric approach to digital transformation. Max believes success comes from seeing technology not just as code, but as a solution that addresses real challenges, goals, and even fears of businesses worldwide.

Thank you, Max, for accepting our invitation.

Max, we'll start with our traditional question. Please tell us a little about yourself - like your childhood, your education, and how you've developed professionally.

I grew up in Israel, where being curious about technology is almost part of the culture. I’m not a developer—I’ve always been the business guy in tech—but that early foundation mattered. As a kid in the Web-1.0 days I taught myself some HTML and CSS and spun up a tiny fan site with a forum. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it taught me something I still believe today: products work when they connect to real people and real value.

In high school I went deep on a programming-and-math track, then moved abroad for university to study intercultural relations and business. That’s where it clicked for me that my lane is translating between tech and outcomes—turning capabilities into something a buyer can trust and a business can measure.

Right after university, Roman Rimsha hired me into his team at my first international tech company. When he left to co-found Sigli, I stayed on a while and later spent a few years building the commercial side at other firms. We kept in touch. Eventually he reached out and asked me to join Sigli to build the commercial engine—so I came in as Chief Business Development Officer.

I’ve been in tech services for about fifteen years now, and since joining Sigli I’ve helped the company grow from a few dozen people to around a hundred. Day to day that means shaping positioning, focusing on the right accounts, opening multi-threaded conversations, and earning trust at the executive level. I lead cross-functional work across sales, marketing, and delivery, close multi-year enterprise agreements, and put more discipline around how we qualify opportunities, forecast, and measure value after go-live. None of that is glamorous, but it compounds: shorter cycles, cleaner handoffs, and partnerships that last because the outcomes are clear.

If there’s a throughline in my story, it’s this: I started as a kid curious about how the web works, and I ended up building the systems that help clients get real results from it. The tools change every year; the job—align stakeholders on the real problem, de-risk the path, and deliver measurable outcomes—stays the same.

Thank you for sharing that. Now let’s talk about Sigli. For those who may not know the company yet, how would you describe what Sigli does and the impact it’s making? And in your view, what truly sets Sigli apart from other digital product development companies?

Sigli builds digital products and modernizes existing ones, but the real job is simpler: we help companies turn technology into business outcomes they can feel—revenue, efficiency, risk reduction, better customer experiences. That’s been the idea from day one, and it’s why the culture resonated with me so strongly when I joined.

I’ll be honest: from the outside, a lot of companies in our space look the same. Similar services, similar stack logos, similar promises. What’s different at Sigli is the way we bridge the gap between tech and business. We’re very explicit about it. We start by aligning on the business problem and the constraints around it—budget, timeline, risk, compliance—before we talk about solutions. Then we design, build, and iterate with that agreement as the north star. It sounds obvious, but in practice many teams still optimize for shipping features. We optimize for outcomes.

That shows up in how we work with clients day to day. We spend time building real relationships, because the work is complex and only getting more so. Technology keeps layering on new possibilities and new risks, and the only way through that complexity is trust: being clear about trade-offs, sharing bad news early, keeping executive and technical stakeholders in the same conversation, and measuring value after launch—not just velocity during the build. When those relationships are healthy, decisions get faster, scope gets cleaner, and the results are stronger.

We’re also a very international team, which helps. Different markets, different user expectations, different regulatory realities—having those perspectives in the room makes us better at connecting the dots. And internally, there’s a shared understanding that we’re a services company: our clients succeed, or none of this matters. That mindset keeps us grounded. Yes, we care about engineering quality and design craft. But the reason to care is so that the business on the other side hits its goals.

So if I had to put it in one line: Sigli exists to translate technical possibility into business clarity. That’s our culture, that’s our process, and that’s why clients work with us.

Could you share a project or case study that best illustrates how Sigli helps businesses?

For me it’s not just about projects, it’s about relationships. A good example is our ongoing work with the Allkind Group, a collection of companies focused on helping people with disabilities and additional needs thrive through accessible, inclusive platforms. We’ve partnered across their three brands and touched several products over the years, and I think the strength of that partnership says as much about Sigli as any single case study.

One initiative I’m particularly proud of started in 2022, when AI suddenly moved from the margins to the front page. The Allkind team wanted to integrate AI into their services for the right reasons—not as a buzzword, but to make learning tangibly easier for people with dyslexia. The brief was clear: build a conversational educational assistant that delivers specific, accurate guidance with no hallucinations and in a format that genuinely supports learning, not just chatting.

We approached it the way we approach most complex problems: start with the business goal, then design the technology around it. In this case, that meant a very data-first mindset, careful scoping, and a lot of iteration with real users and educators. Under the hood it blended machine learning with API and cloud engineering and a fair amount of data work; on the surface it needed to be simple, accessible, and reliable. Getting those pieces to line up is harder than it sounds—bringing a “chat” experience up to an educational standard requires tight guardrails and constant tuning.

Is it “finished”? No—and that’s the point. The system keeps evolving as the models evolve, as the curriculum changes, and as we learn from real usage. What matters is that it’s doing the job it was hired to do: improving the efficiency and quality of learning conversations, increasing engagement, and raising satisfaction for the institutions and learners who use it. That’s the outcome the client cares about, and it’s the outcome we optimize for.

If you step back, it neatly illustrates how we work: a mission we believe in, a long-term relationship built on trust, and a technology solution that stays anchored to real business and user results.

Sigli describes its philosophy as aligning business needs with technology “like a puzzle.” Can you give an example of how this works in practice?

We keep it simple. At the start of every engagement, we agree on the goal, the few things we can’t break, and how we’ll work together. We use short phase checklists to keep us honest—one for discovery, one for build, one for run. They’re based loosely on COBIT (who decides, what risks we’re taking) and ITIL (how changes and incidents are handled), but we keep them light so people actually use them.

We talk often with the client team and keep a regular exec check-in so decisions don’t stall. When it helps, we spend a couple of days together in person—either in Vilnius or on-site—to unblock the tricky parts. Each project has a delivery manager to keep things moving, and everyone on our side has a mentor they can call when they’re stuck.

On the build side, we write down key decisions in plain language, demo early, and ship in small pieces—usually behind feature flags—so people approve something real, not slides. Before a release we always do peer review, the right automated tests, a quick smoke check in a realistic environment, and an accessibility check when it’s relevant.

When something changes mid-stream—and it will—the checklist already spells out who decides and what gives. We trim the nice-to-haves, adjust the plan, and protect the outcome the client actually needs. No drama, just steady progress.

From healthcare to e-commerce, Sigli covers many industries. How do you adapt your approach when working across such different fields?

I don’t think “industry expertise” is a magic key. Two companies in the same industry can want completely different things, and their constraints can be night-and-day. We’ve built risk-scoring for one client and been asked for something similar by another, only to find the variables, data, and culture were so different that a copy-paste wouldn’t help—even if IP allowed it. So we start with the client’s goal and context, not with a template.

What does carry over is the craft. The tools and patterns—solid data pipelines, search and recommendation, access control, eventing, observability—are reusable, but the way you assemble them depends on the business. With AI, for example, we run a quick feasibility pass before anyone gets excited: do we have the right data (volume, quality, permissions), is the use case tolerant to error, what’s the latency/scale expectation, what will it cost to serve, and how will we measure success? If those answers look good, we move; if not, we say so and save everyone time.

Regulation and certification can be the real separator. Some health or finance work demands heavy compliance. We’re careful there: either we scope the work so it fits what we can responsibly deliver, or we bring in the right partners and make a plan to expand our own coverage. In other spaces—like edtech—the same technical know-how often maps cleanly across clients, even when their brands and audiences are quite different.

So our approach is simple: respect IP, respect the client’s reality, and reuse know-how rather than boilerplate. The result is that we still benefit from experience across industries, but each solution is tuned to the business in front of us—not the last one that looked similar on paper.

Sigli is ISO/IEC 27001 certified. How important is security compliance in today’s software development landscape?

Hugely—and more so every year. The industry has grown out of the old “move fast and break things” phase. You can still move fast, but if you break trust, nothing else matters. Most buyers today won’t even start without basic assurances around how their data is handled, who can touch it, and what happens when something goes wrong.

For us, that shows up in two ways: habits and proof. The habits are quiet but constant—classifying data early, agreeing what we won’t collect, least-privilege access by default, masking data in non-production, and keeping change and incident paths clear so we don’t improvise under stress. It’s the same mindset I mentioned earlier with our phase checklists: in discovery we name the risks; in delivery we put the simple controls in place; in run/operate we make sure people know who decides and how we respond. Because we work in the EU, GDPR isn’t an edge case—it’s table stakes.

The proof is certification. An external auditor checks that our security management system actually exists and actually runs—policies, access controls, asset inventory, incident handling, vendor checks, the unglamorous things that reduce risk. For many clients, that shortens procurement and lets a small internal team “borrow” our maturity instead of building everything from scratch. It doesn’t make us invincible; it makes us disciplined.

Security doesn’t have to kill speed. We ship in small slices, use feature flags, and test in environments that resemble reality. If we’re experimenting, we ring-fence it. When something changes—new regulation, new data constraints—we adjust the plan without pretending nothing happened. That way we protect the outcome and the relationship at the same time.

AI projects make this even more obvious. The conversation starts with data: quality, permissions, retention, and where the model will see it. We put guardrails around PII, keep lower environments clean, and track what the system did and why so we can explain it later. If the use case isn’t safe or the data isn’t ready, we’ll say so and save everyone time.

Bottom line: certification is the receipt; behavior is the product. We invest in both, because clients aren’t buying code from us—they’re buying outcomes they can trust.

You often talk about a “business-centric approach.” What does that mean for you personally, and how do you bring it into Sigli’s daily operations?

For me, this is a habit. At the start of any engagement, I ask three questions:

1. What would make this a win when your board reviews it three months after launch?

2. What absolutely cannot break while we work toward that?
   Which decision will this help you make faster?

If we cannot answer in plain language, we do not start.

Before any work begins, we set a baseline. That might be how long something takes today, what it costs, or how many people succeed. Then we define a six-week test — the smallest change that will show we are making progress. This keeps us honest.

During delivery, I act as the link between client and team. If a feature does not move the stated goal, it waits. If a risk could derail the goal, the client hears about it early and we adjust before time or money is wasted.

After launch, we run short value checks with the client. Fifteen minutes, one chart, one decision: keep, tweak, or kill. No theatre. No vanity metrics. Inside the team, I limit how many priorities can change at once and I push for writing in the client’s terms, for example “cut time to quote from two days to four hours” instead of “implement service X.”

Sometimes the right move is to say no. A client recently wanted a flashy add-on that would have looked good in a demo but done nothing for adoption. We skipped it, shipped a plain but effective change that smoothed onboarding, and saw usage climb within a week.

That is the job: make the goal clear, make trade-offs visible, measure what matters, and take responsibility for the outcome. Everything else is decoration.

Hosting the Innovantage Podcast shows your passion for exploring innovation. What’s the most surprising insight you’ve gained from interviewing other leaders?

What keeps surprising me is how often the best answer is the simplest one. One of my favorite moments was with William De Pretre, who leads AI at Allkind Group. When we talked about where to use AI, he kept asking a plain question: “Do we need AI for that?” Not “could we,” but “should we.” It sounds almost too simple, but it cuts through vanity features and forces you to look at data quality, tolerance for error, and whether a rules-based approach would solve the job faster. I’ve taken that into client work more than once—swapping a fancy model for a tighter flow or a smarter dataset and shipping something useful sooner.

From the public sector side, a conversation with Dr. Ott Velsberg, the Chief Data Officer of Estonia, pushed me to think bigger about foundations. The takeaway wasn’t a single tool; it was how they treat data literacy like infrastructure—budgeted, measured, and built into everyday services. It made me pay closer attention to “boring” adoption questions: who will actually use this, what training exists, and how do we know it’s working outside a demo?

And then there’s academia and operators—professors, founders, product leads—each with a different vocabulary but the same pattern: progress happens when you strip ideas to what’s essential and test that, not the press release version. That mix of perspectives is why I keep doing the show. Every guest gives me one small, usable idea, and those small ideas compound: a better question to start with, a cleaner way to measure impact, or the courage to say “not yet” when the urge is to build.

Outside of the boardroom and podcast studio, how do you usually spend your free time?

I like staying close to the ecosystem. I mentor startups at the local Plug and Play accelerator here in Vilnius, and even outside the program I try to help early-stage founders when they hit a wall—usually around go-to-market, pricing, or the first few enterprise conversations. I also speak at events on sales and marketing in tech, and I guest-lecture from time to time on those topics. The teaching piece keeps me honest: if you can’t explain it simply to a room of students or founders, you probably don’t understand it well enough.

On the personal side, I’ve become a morning swimmer—it resets my head and gives me energy for the day. And I play the guitar. I’m not forming a band anytime soon, but it’s a good way to unplug and do something that isn’t a spreadsheet or a roadmap. That mix—community, learning, and a bit of routine—keeps me grounded.

And just for fun, what’s your go-to comfort food after a long week?

Pasta. It’s not one dish, but that’s the point. My wife is the real chef at home and I’m the happy sous-chef—chopping, stirring, tasting, but with pasta I can put on the big hat. Sometimes it’s a simple carbonara, other times a slow bolognese. We tweak things depending on what’s in the fridge, and it always turns into a small ritual at the end of the week: cook together, talk, eat. Simple, flexible, and reliably comforting.

Max, before we wrap up, what message or piece of advice would you like to share with businesses looking to succeed in today’s digital world?

Ask for help—early and often. I’m not saying “hire us or else.” I mean, use the community around you. If you’re a startup staring at the end of your runway, talk to people who’ve been there: mentors, operators, customers, even friendly competitors. If you’re inside a big company and you’re stuck under targets, step outside your usual circle and get a fresh pair of eyes. Most problems get smaller once they’re shared.

Be specific about what you need. “We need growth” isn’t a brief. “We need ten enterprise intros in logistics” or “we need to cut onboarding from two weeks to three days” is something people can act on. When you ask clearly, doors open—intros happen, pilots start, and you learn faster.

And finally, don’t do it alone. The world is volatile and messy; the only reliable counterweight is a network you can lean on. Find the people who share your standards and values, and build with them. Together you’ll get further than you will by trying to be a hero in isolation.

Thank you so much, Max, for sharing your insights and experiences with us today. It’s been a pleasure learning about your journey and the exciting work you’re doing at Sigli.

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