Strategic Growth and Global Impact in the Tech Space – Exclusive Interview with Palina Litvinkovich
- Brainz Magazine
- Jul 7
- 5 min read
Palina Litvinkovich is a Gold Award-winning strategist, tech entrepreneur, and delivery expert with nearly a decade of experience leading global teams across Europe and the U.S. This interview highlights her major contributions to the tech and digital industries and her growing impact as a founder, mentor, and operational leader.
Palina’s path has been anything but linear, and that’s exactly what makes her story so compelling. A strategic thinker with a creative edge, she has built her career across countries, time zones, and industries, bringing people together, solving complex business problems, and leading meaningful projects that scale.
In this conversation, she reflects on her journey so far from rebuilding her career in a new country, to leading global teams, to co-founding her own company, and the lessons that helped her grow along the way. Her approach combines calm leadership, structured management, and a human-first philosophy. In 2025, her impact was recognized on the global stage when she received the Gold Award for Strategic Growth & Client Delivery Leadership from ECDMA. But if you ask her, the real achievement isn’t the title, it’s the people she’s worked with and the systems she’s helped build.
Palina Litvinkovich, Co-Founder, Entrepreneur, Project Manager
Let’s start from the beginning. What has your personal and professional journey looked like so far?
I was born and raised in a small city in Belarus. From a young age, I was endlessly curious about how things work, how people think, and how to do things that inspire you and motivate others. That curiosity led me across industries, roles, and borders.
What ties everything together is my love for structure, innovation, and people. I’ve always gravitated toward roles that blend strategy with execution, from HR to leading a tech department. Whether it’s scaling client accounts, launching new initiatives, or designing delivery systems that work, I’ve always sought ways to create value. That belief became the foundation of Okeen, the boutique software company my co-founder Ivan and I built around one core principle: great products come from strong partnerships.
Now I’m based in Chicago. The skyline may have changed, but the mission hasn’t: build, lead, and deliver with clarity, care, and quality.
You’ve worked across continents, industries, and roles. What has shaped you the most as a leader?
Change has been my greatest teacher. In today’s fast-moving world where markets shift overnight and priorities change quickly, my adaptability has become my superpower. I know how to pivot, reassess, and lead through uncertainty without losing direction.
But leadership is about more than reacting; it’s about taking on responsibility and ownership. I’ve seen many project managers act as liaisons, simply passing information back and forth, avoiding responsibility by shifting blame between the team and the client. That’s not leadership. True leaders own the outcomes. And now it’s also one of our core values at Okeen: we don’t just execute tasks, we build trust and treat our clients’ businesses as if they were our own.
Over time, I noticed that many of my clients, who were C-level executives, weren’t just sharing ideas with me; they saw me as an expert and were asking for my input and trusting me to guide product decisions. At the same time, my teams were following my lead through the hardest moments. That’s when I realized the difference between managing and leading.
Your leadership style feels very people-first. How would you describe your management philosophy?
My leadership is rooted in trust, clear communication, and accountability. I believe in setting up systems that empower people, not micromanaging them. I want every team I lead to feel both supported and challenged. That’s the environment where people grow and where great work happens.
A powerful example of this was a complex project we ran for an Australian client. I built a new engineering team from scratch, and no one knew each other. It was a high-pressure, high-stakes environment, and proactive collaboration was essential. But in the beginning, the team was completely silent: they wouldn’t speak up, let alone contribute ideas.
So I started with myself: I was open, curious, and empathetic. I explained the why behind every decision and invited their input. Over time, the dynamic changed. People became engaged, began supporting one another, and started working with each other, not just next to each other.
The CEO of Yellow, my company at the time, actually came to me and said he’d never seen some of those developers so proactive. It was one of the cases where not only I, but also the people around me, saw the tangible impact of my leadership approach.
Can you walk us through a project that really tested your skills technically, strategically, or emotionally?
High-stakes projects often test different parts of your leadership, but early in my career, there was one project that tested every part of it. I led a multi-phase medtech mobile application for a rapidly scaling U.S. company. Initially, it looked like a straightforward project, until halfway through when the client pivoted their business model entirely, and almost everything we had scoped, planned, and built up to that point became obsolete overnight.
I had to pull the core stakeholders into a strategy sprint, redefine the success metrics, and reshape the entire backlog into digestible phases that aligned with their new model. It required rewriting delivery processes, renegotiating internal capacity, and keeping the team emotionally grounded during a big reset. But in the end, we launched successfully just in time for their investor pitch.
That experience sharpened crucial managerial skills: strategic thinking, stakeholder alignment, emotional resilience, and delivery under pressure.
Looking back, what are the boldest decisions you’ve made that influenced your career?
I never waited for the “perfect” moment. Instead, I chose to explore and act on things. I said yes to challenges I wasn’t 100% ready for: I moved across continents on my own to study business, shifted industries, and tried new positions to figure out what I love doing. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed, but I always learned.
Being brave enough to try and fail gave me more than any title or certification ever could. It shaped my self-awareness, sharpened my direction, and gave me the courage to bet on myself.
We’ve talked a lot about leadership and results. But what keeps you personally motivated?
Curiosity, growth, and the people around me.
I want to be in rooms where the problems are big and the people are sharp. Seeing my teams thrive, watching clients feel seen and supported, and helping someone step into leadership for the first time that’s what fuels me. I’ve been a Senior Member of the E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Association since 2023, and I’ve attended various tech and leadership events across Europe and the U.S. In 2024, I was invited to serve as a judge for the Armenia Digital Awards, selecting top leaders in tech and innovation. I’m always looking for ways to collaborate with smart people and support those entering the field.
One of my favorite quotes is from Steve Jobs: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” I live that way, always hungry for knowledge, and never afraid to ask questions, because that’s what helps me grow. And my motto (even tattooed on my body!) is: Explore. Evolve. Enjoy.
What’s next for you?
Continuous growth, personal and professional.
I want to keep scaling Okeen, solving complex challenges, and partnering with ambitious clients who have bold ideas and are driven to build meaningful solutions. Just as importantly, I’ll keep investing in people, my team, our clients, and even those I haven’t met yet, but may one day support.
In 2025, I was awarded Gold in Strategic Growth & Client Delivery Leadership by the ECDMA Global Awards, after a months-long evaluation by 80 independent jury members worldwide. That recognition means a lot not just for what it represents, but because it affirms the decade of hard and consistent work, expertise, and leadership that brought me here.
And that’s what keeps me going: knowing that I’ve built something with impact, influenced people around me, and that there’s always more to learn, explore, and build.
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