Blog
    by Maija-Liisa Sutela, Product Owner, Nortal Finland

    From hospital floors to hospital systems

    I spent eight years as a nurse before moving into tech. While what I do day to day has changed, my focus is the same: improving patient and staff experiences.

    Service

    Microsoft

    Industry

    Healthcare

    Space management might sound like a logistics problem. In a hospital, it is not. When a doctor cannot find a suitable room at the right time, a patient's appointment gets delayed or moved. For someone who may have waited weeks for that appointment, even a small disruption matters. When systems don’t talk to each other, staff spend their shift solving problems that should never have existed. I saw this play out constantly on the hospital floor. Now I build the systems that fix it.

    I joined Nortal in early 2025 as a Product Owner for the Space Resource Management application used in Finnish healthcare. I work on various projects, including our cooperation with Varha, the Wellbeing Services County of Southwest Finland. The application was already in daily use when I arrived. My job has been to keep it running well and make sure it keeps up with how our customers actually work.

    The part no one sees

    This perspective offers new challenges. What strikes me about this work is how many things must be true at the same time. A doctor needs the right room, a patient needs to know where to go, a self-service check-in kiosk needs to reflect what was just booked, and an appointment system needs to agree. None of it is visible to the people using it, and that is exactly how it should be.

    In practice, it means nothing stays isolated. A change in one place ripples somewhere else. Every technical change we make is carefully weighed with the architects on the team, and that back-and-forth is a core part of the work, not a side effect.

    That invisibility is accompanied by responsibility. Some of our customers handle up to 20,000 space reservations each month, and when something goes wrong during a busy morning, the impact is immediate and affects real patient encounters. Coming from nursing, I do not need to imagine what that means. That is probably why I take the reliability side of this work quite seriously.

    Domain knowledge you cannot learn from a brief

    Much of my job involves talking to people — staff, managers, technical counterparts on the customer side. Healthcare professionals describe their day differently than product managers; they talk about situations, not requirements. For example, "Someone deleted my reservation" may sound like an access-control issue, but often, the real problem is about trust and visibility. People want to feel confident their reservations are secure and that they have a clear view of what is happening around them.

    My nursing background helps me hear those conversations more accurately. I understand how hospital staff move through a shift, what makes a disruption serious, and why even a small friction point at the wrong moment matters. That context shapes the questions I ask and what I push back on. It also means I can sit with healthcare teams and speak their language, not just translate for them.

    In one customer project, my counterpart had no healthcare background at all. The domain knowledge had to come from me, which made listening and analysis even more central. That is often how it goes — the product work and the domain expertise are not separate tracks. They run together.

    What production teaches you

    One thing I have learned at Nortal is that post-go-live is not a quieter phase. It is a different kind of work. Last year, we hit a Power Platform limitation: when record counts exceed 5,000, the system stops displaying exact values. For a customer managing up to 20,000 reservations a month, staff suddenly lost visibility into the numbers they rely on to run their day. Fixing this required several changes to make sure everything displays correctly at scale. Situations like this do not come with a template — you figure them out with the people around you.

    Staff who work across multiple buildings commonly do not know the spaces well enough to book confidently from a list. A room name or number means little if you have never been to that wing. That is why we are building a map-based interface, so staff can see the building, find what they need, and book directly from the map.

    Power Platform has a reputation for simple use cases. However, I have learned that it supports genuinely complex, production-grade systems when the decisions behind them are driven by real user needs, just like these. Coming from a nursing background rather than software development, one of the most valuable lessons this work has taught me is that domain knowledge is just as crucial as the technology.

    What makes this work worth doing

    When a nurse or doctor does not have to worry about room logistics, they can focus on the person in front of them. That is the outcome that matters. Some of our customers are reducing costs and using their facilities more efficiently, and for public-sector organizations working with strict budgets, that is significant. But the part I find most concrete is the daily friction that disappears.

    The work is more than just about the product. It is about understanding what people actually need and being honest about what is worth building now and what can wait. That kind of judgment is only possible with a team that takes the same things seriously. Meaningful problems, real stakes, and people who care about getting things right — that combination is what makes this work worth doing.

    Learn more about Power Platform careers at Nortal Finland

     

    Our teams work on large-scale and long-term projects where Power Platform plays a critical role in solving real business challenges. You get the freedom to shape solutions, the trust to work flexibly, and the support of a strong local and global expert community.

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    Why cyber exercising matters

    • Reveals critical gaps in technical controls, escalation paths, and decision-making workflows.
    • Fosters organisation-wide collaboration, improving coordaination and communication across all roles, functions, and levels. Builds confidence under pressure, giving participants, groups, and organisations muscle memory they can rely on.
    • Exposes participants to real-world attack techniques, improving detection, containment, and familiarity.
    • Strengthens regulatory and stakeholder alignment by stress-testing notification and reporting procedures in a simulated environment.
    • Fosters a culture of continuous improvement by turning lessons from exercises into actionable changes across people, processes, and technologies. 

    Get in touch with our talent acquisition in Finland

    Curious about our open positions or about life at Nortal? We’d love to hear from you!

    Virpi Kivinen

    Virpi Kivinen

    Lead Talent Partner, Nortal Finland