SOFTSWISS CTO Outlines Five Engineering-Business Alignment Pitfalls Ahead of Tech Race Summit 2026

The race between business growth and engineering scalability is a perennial challenge in iGaming. Operators demand speed to launch, enter new markets, and release features ahead of competitors. Engineering teams share that ambition but must also ensure the platform remains stable months down the line. This divergence in perspective often creates tension. Sergey Kastsukevich, Chief Technology Officer at SOFTSWISS, outlines five common oversights that operators and providers make when planning technology work, offering insight ahead of the Tech Race Summit 2026.

Fast Launches Can Create Slow Platforms

A typical product development assumption holds that the first version only needs to function, with improvements to follow. In practice, a small-feature update on a roadmap can trigger an expensive, full-scale redesign. Kastsukevich warns: “Business always wants things fast, high-quality, and cheap. But you can only pick two out of the three.” This tension is at the core of every CTO’s negotiation. In a startup, accepting a 30% risk of system failure may be rational; for a mature platform handling real money across regulated markets, it is not. Making that distinction explicit early on reduces costs later.

Scalability Starts Long Before the First Customer Arrives

The question “Why can’t you just handle a million users?” is more common than it should be, implying scale is an on-demand setting. For engineers, the crucial question is whether the system was built with eventual high demand in mind. Scalability is an architectural decision made early. When new requirements pile up—more markets, payment methods, integrations, or traffic—each adds load implications not captured in the brief. Kastsukevich stresses that engineering must ask, “what does this system need to handle, at what scale, under what conditions?” from the same conversation. Post-development scalability is the worst possible time to address it.

Technical Debt Eventually Becomes Business Debt

Technical debt is often viewed as an engineering problem, but Kastsukevich calls it a business decision. Shortcuts taken to hit a launch date or patches applied under deadline pressure seem manageable individually, yet they simply postpone costs. Over time, releases slow, bugs grow harder to fix, and every new change rests on fragile old code. A straightforward feature request can stretch from three weeks to three months. Eventually, the business must approve a major rebuild that steady investment could have avoided. “Technical debt never disappears. It simply waits,” he notes.

Outdated Technology Is a Risk, Not Just an Inconvenience

“If it works, why change it?” is a reasonable question with an unreasonable answer. Legacy systems function until they don’t become progressively harder to maintain, with fewer engineers familiar with them, slowing security updates and integrations. Convincing business leaders to invest in technology that isn’t visibly broken is one of the hardest conversations for engineering heads. The immediate payoff may not be faster platforms or higher revenue, but the real benefit is reducing future risk. Old technology constrains what new solutions can connect to, blocking product decisions. Reframing this as risk management changes the question from “what do we gain?” to “what do we avoid?”

Great Products Need Time for Research

Large tech firms like Google and OpenAI invest heavily in research, exploring ideas that may take years to reach users. Smaller companies often dismiss this as a luxury. The result is that engineering teams spend most of their time on delivery, with little room for exploration. Teams that experiment learn faster and spot opportunities earlier. When a new technology shifts from interesting to essential—as AI has in recent years—they are already prepared. Research time is an investment in the company’s ability to adapt. Kastsukevich remarks: “The bottleneck is no longer how to build something, but what exactly to build.”

The Tech Race Summit 2026, taking place on 10 September in Warsaw, will feature over 30 speakers from AWS, Google, Oracle, Cloudflare, and others, offering a space to explore these challenges further.