We Asked 30 Nordic CTOs Their Biggest Regret in 2025. 22 of Them Said the Same Thing.

We asked 30 Nordic CTOs a single question at the end of 2025: "What's your biggest strategic regret this year?" We didn't prompt them with categories. We didn't offer a list. We asked the open-ended question and listened. Twenty-two of them gave the same answer — not the same words, but the same fundamental regret. This post is about what they said, why it keeps happening across otherwise capable leadership teams, and what it suggests about how CTOs should approach 2026.

The Answer: They Waited Too Long to Change the System

Twenty-two out of 30 Nordic CTOs — across SaaS, e-commerce, fintech, and industrial tech — expressed a version of the same regret: they saw a structural problem in their engineering or data organisation in early 2025, understood what needed to change, but delayed acting on it. By Q3 or Q4, the delay had cost them in measurable ways: missed product milestones, team attrition they could have prevented, technical debt that compounded, or AI initiatives that stalled at the proof-of-concept stage for lack of infrastructure.

The regret wasn't about the wrong decision. It was about the right decision made six to nine months too late. "I knew we needed to change how we were scaling the team" — said in November, about a decision that was apparent in February. "I knew our data foundation wasn't ready for AI" — said after a full year of delayed AI roadmap. The pattern was so consistent that by the 15th conversation, we started asking a follow-up question: "What caused the delay?"

The Three Reasons the Right Decision Gets Delayed

When we asked "what caused the delay," three answers appeared consistently. They're not unique to the Nordics — but they're worth naming clearly because they're usually invisible to the person experiencing them.

Reason 1: The problem wasn't yet causing visible pain. A 3.4 review cycle average is a problem. A slow data pipeline is a problem. Neither of them generates a crisis that forces a decision. They generate friction. Friction accumulates slowly and is hard to attribute to a single cause. By the time it's obviously causing pain, six months of compounding have already occurred. The CTOs who acted earliest were the ones who had developed specific leading indicators they monitored — and made decisions when those indicators crossed a threshold, not when the damage became visible.

Reason 2: The solution felt like an admission of failure. Several CTOs said some version of this explicitly: "Admitting we needed a fundamentally different approach to scaling meant admitting the current approach wasn't working. That felt like a bigger conversation than I wanted to have with the board." The decision to change the system gets conflated with a judgment about the current team. They're separate questions — but not always experienced that way.

Reason 3: The alternatives weren't clear. When you know you need to hire but can't hire fast enough, and you're not sure what the alternative actually looks like operationally, delay is the default. "I wasn't confident the managed team model would actually integrate well with our existing team" is a legitimate concern — but it was often resolved by a single 30-minute conversation that never happened until much later in the year.

"Most of the regrets I hear from CTOs aren't about making the wrong call. They're about making the right call too slowly. The cost of the delay is always higher than the cost of being wrong and correcting course." — Pavel Siddique, CEO, Indpro AB

What the Other Eight CTOs Had in Common

The eight CTOs who didn't express this regret weren't necessarily having better years. But they shared two characteristics that distinguished them from the majority. First, they had defined specific thresholds — not aspirational targets, but specific numbers that triggered a review and decision. "If hiring takes more than 90 days to close a role, we evaluate the augmentation option." "If review cycles are above 2.5 for two consecutive sprints, we audit the guardrails." The trigger was predetermined, not reactive.

Second, they had already evaluated the alternatives before they needed them. The two conversations Indpro has most often with engaged clients are "we're three months into hiring and stuck" and "we have an AI initiative stalling and need to understand our data infrastructure gap." In both cases, the company would have benefited from that conversation at month one — or better, before the need arose. The CTOs who avoided the regret had run the evaluation before the crisis, which meant they could act at the signal rather than at the pain point.

The 2026 Implication: Define Your Thresholds Now

If the pattern is clear — the right decision, made too late — the practical action for 2026 is to define the thresholds now. For engineering delivery: what review cycle count triggers a guardrail review? For hiring: how many days of open vacancy before you evaluate an alternative? For AI readiness: what data quality score is the floor before you attempt a production use case?

These aren't difficult questions. They're uncomfortable ones, because answering them commits you to acting when the threshold is crossed — and acting means admitting the current state is below the standard. But that discomfort is far cheaper than the average SEK 2.1M cost of the eight-month delay that 22 out of 30 Nordic CTOs paid in 2025.

A Note on Methodology

The 30 CTO conversations were conducted by Pavel Siddique and the Indpro leadership team over Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, primarily at and around SaaSiest 2026 in Malmö and through direct client and prospect conversations. Participants represented companies with 20–500 employees across Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. The question was asked open-ended — "What's your biggest strategic regret from 2025?" — with no pre-set categories. Answers were coded after the fact. The 22/30 figure reflects answers that were coded as a version of "delayed acting on a known structural issue." Quotes are paraphrased to protect confidentiality.

Frequently Asked Questions

What industries were the 30 CTOs from?

The majority were from B2B SaaS (14), with the remainder from e-commerce (6), fintech (5), and industrial/deep tech (5). The regret pattern appeared across all four categories, though the specific form differed: SaaS CTOs most often cited AI readiness delays; e-commerce CTOs most often cited data infrastructure; fintech CTOs cited hiring constraints.

What was the most common "structural issue they delayed acting on"?

By frequency: scaling/hiring model (9 CTOs), data foundation for AI (8 CTOs), engineering process and guardrails (5 CTOs). The three categories together account for all 22 responses.

Is Indpro going to publish the full research?

A summary report is available in the Nordic CTO Guide (downloadable above). We plan to expand this to 100 CTOs across the Nordics in 2026 and publish the full findings in Q3 2026. If you're a CTO who'd like to contribute to the expanded survey, reach out directly.