Artem Mykhailiuk and the work after the launch

A parliamentary seat is a peculiar thing to turn down. There is a number beside your name, a commission makes a decision, and a career that previously required some explanation can suddenly fit on a business card. In August 2022, Artem Mykhailiuk reached that point. He had been number 142 on the Servant of the People party’s 2019 electoral list. Vacancies opened. On 2 August, he was recognised as elected. By 19 August, he had declined the mandate.

His explanation was short enough to survive a committee meeting: he believed he could be more useful in other areas. There was no elaborate farewell to the parliamentary career he had yet to begin. The decision left a different question hanging over his biography. Where, exactly, did he think useful work happened?

Look back at his years as a HELSI co-founder and early chief executive, and a possible answer emerges. In his descriptions of building software, the moment of release rarely gets the last word. He talks about the people expected to use it, the instruction they need and the work required inside an organisation. The product has arrived. Someone still has to make Monday morning function.

Before the software, the classroom

Mykhailiuk was born on 14 March 1981. He studied at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science. In the early 2000s, he participated in student self-government. One of the people he knew there was Oleksandr Korniyenko, a connection that would become relevant years later in a very different kind of organisation.

After university, both worked as business trainers. Mykhailiuk also founded the Team Master group; his entrepreneurial record includes Business Show and BizGames. The names put a classroom beside the computer in his working life. He was involved in explaining how people and teams work, as well as in software projects.

That combination matters when reading his later interviews. A product manager can describe a new system as a set of functions. A trainer has another problem to solve: somebody has to understand the functions, remember them and use them while doing a job. The most elegant instruction is of limited comfort to a person who has lost the cursor.

The connection between those two kinds of work is an interpretation of his career, rather than a plan he announced at university. Still, it provides a useful way into the decisions that followed. Computer science supplied one part of his background. Teaching people supplied another.

A product leaves the workshop

Before HELSI, Mykhailiuk and Samvel Akobian worked in IT outsourcing, developing websites and products. In late 2015, they and Yaroslav Ivanenko helped shape the HELSI concept. Yevhen Donets and Yevhen Hubych joined the founding group. The enterprise had several authors, even when Mykhailiuk was its public face.

There is a familiar tension in that move from contracted work to a product of your own. A client’s brief gives a project its boundaries. A startup has to decide which boundaries deserve to exist. You inherit responsibility for the question as well as for delivering an answer.

The early team chose to release a minimum viable product by the end of 2016, rather than spend a year building a complete system in private. That put an imperfect but usable version in front of real organisations. It also brought their expectations into the room sooner. The team could learn from actual use, with all the inconvenience that actual users are entitled to provide.

The word “viable” carries much of the weight in that phrase. A demonstration can succeed in a quiet room with its makers standing nearby. A working product must survive someone else’s habits. Mykhailiuk’s early HELSI chapter is interesting because it repeatedly returns to that distance between showing a tool and establishing a routine.

The password was only the beginning

Training began with quite basic actions. The early instruction included switching on a computer, using a touchpad, moving information between a flash drive and a computer, and working with Google Calendar. Those are modest items for a technology biography. They are also quite specific. Somebody had to work out where the lesson should begin.

In March 2017, Mykhailiuk described an experiment in which a workplace offered time for people to practise on computers. The team wondered whether anyone would be interested. People came. The small surprise is revealing: making room to learn can uncover interest that a hurried introduction never gives anyone a chance to show.

By January 2018, he was discussing computer classes, motivation and the need to train people without pulling them away from their ordinary work. His description of implementation included instruction, initial data entry and changes to working processes. Expansion therefore required people who could travel and help an organisation through the transition.

It is easy to imagine the founder’s calendar becoming less glamorous at this point. A launch can be marked with a photograph. Practice sessions require arranging chairs, time and patience. The latter activities are less likely to appear on a congratulatory slide, although the slide depends on them.

The distinction has a commercial consequence. Every new organisation brings another set of working habits. Growth can multiply the work of explaining and supporting a product. For a founder, that makes implementation part of the operating problem, with demands on staffing and attention that cannot be solved by distributing another password.

Twenty-five people, four instructions

In 2019, Mykhailiuk’s university connection with Korniyenko led into national electoral politics. Korniyenko encouraged him to join the parliamentary campaign operation. Mykhailiuk helped form a support team for candidates, many of whom had little experience of elections. His account described 25 regional advisers working under the central group.

Their brief had four parts: explain what candidates should do, what they should avoid, how to carry out the work and how to give feedback. It was a recognisable training assignment inside a political campaign. The stakes and the audience had changed; the need for instructions had survived intact.

There is no need to turn that episode into a solitary explanation for an election result. Campaigns involve candidates, voters, institutions and circumstances far beyond an organiser’s control. What the episode does establish is a particular job Mykhailiuk undertook: building a way to pass practical advice between a central team and people working across regions.

That same year, his HELSI chapter closed. He announced his departure in October, and Donets succeeded him as CEO in 2019. The company’s subsequent history belongs to a later period of leadership. Mykhailiuk’s part remains the founding and early operating years.

“I believe I will be more useful in other areas now.”

Artem Mykhailiuk, August 2022
English translation from Ukrainian

When the parliamentary opening arrived three years after the campaign, he chose to decline it. The refusal adds an unusual punctuation mark to the sequence: campaign organiser, listed candidate, recognised as elected, mandate declined. His own explanation places usefulness at the centre. It supplies no warrant for inventing a grander motive.

From one organisation to public systems

His later public work placed him around digital government. He was included in the Diia project’s ministry team and among CDTO Campus lecturers as an adviser to the Minister of Digital Transformation. The teaching connection continued, now among people responsible for introducing digital services across public institutions.

In November 2023, Mykhailiuk and Valeriya Ionan were described as leading a Ukrainian digital-transformation delegation visiting Germany. The visit began at GovTech Campus Deutschland in Berlin and included discussions about cooperation in digital transformation aligned with European Union standards. The setting had widened from a startup’s rollout to cooperation between institutions and countries.

In 2025, he appeared on a public panel about GovTech and DefenseTech alongside Kateryna Chernohorenko, Tetiana Prykhodko and Karina Kudriavtseva. At that event, his roles were described as head of Diia.Engine and adviser to the minister. These are dated descriptions of his work, rather than titles to carry indefinitely into the present.

His remarks focused on what government can offer developers through the Brave1 platform. He described support extending beyond grants to expertise, mentorship and connections with other manufacturers, investors and end users. His argument was about the conditions around development: the help that lets a technical idea progress inside a larger system.

In July 2025, he was named as a data governance strategy adviser in the proposed composition of a ministry advisory board. That description fits the scale of the surrounding discussion: how public systems organise information, people and responsibility. It also keeps the chronology precise. The former HELSI chief executive had appeared in another operating environment, with a different set of institutions to understand.

A launch is a date. Adoption takes longer.

The career is easier to understand when its stages retain their differences. Student self-government, business training, a software startup, electoral organisation and ministry advice each have their own purposes. A working method can travel between them without making them the same enterprise.

Mykhailiuk’s early interviews invite attention to the work that happens after agreement in principle. People must learn. Organisations must change a routine. Someone must answer the next question. Those are practical demands, and they are also a useful corrective to the idea that a product’s arrival settles the matter.

The parliamentary refusal gives the story its sharp turn, but the quieter episodes give it texture. There is the computer practice session people actually attended. There is a founder with a training background describing implementation. There is a regional support team with four practical instructions. None requires a heroic speech to be interesting.

At the end of a launch, the team can close the presentation. At the beginning of adoption, another person opens a screen and tries to do some work. Much of Mykhailiuk’s documented career sits near that second moment. It is an ordinary scene, which helps explain why getting it right takes so much effort.