Jaana Ojala started as project manager last summer, helping guide new Idesco products move from concept to launch. As the product development team’s leader, she monitors each product’s development, keeps phases moving steadily and on-schedule. Occasionally a challenge appears, or a risk must be anticipated. For Jaana is also responsible for balancing workloads and individual team members’ well-being. It requires an ability to lead individual people while simultaneously addressing collective challenges.

“I feel settled now in Idesco”, Jaana acknowledges. “Yet I’m still fascinated with how we seamlessly blend an established company’s solidity with such new, evolving technology”, she reflects. She realizes she has not had two similar workdays since starting here. “It is always different but I like it, even the challenges”, she admits. “Solving a problem feels best when it also demands a little thinking first. The best moments at work, though”, she reflects, “are when a sudden, new alternative solution for a problem emerges while we discuss it together in a team meeting”, Jaana notes.

The mother of five, with the two eldest already on their own, Jaana, her husband and her three youngest children live in Oulu. She balances busy work days with her hobby as a singer in the Cocktail Cats, an a cappella group that performs pop, rock and jazz for different occasions like birthdays and company events; their next gig, in May, already has them in regular rehearsal.