What does it take to lead a team behind Gapps’ largest business area? For Suvi Pankakoski, the path wasn’t about following a traditional IT career. She joined Gapps seven years ago without a technical background, and grew step by step into leading a team of Google Workspace experts.
Today, as she prepares to head off on parental leave, Suvi reflects on her journey and what being a Service Lead at Gapps really means. It’s a role built on trust, responsibility, and constant learning – both for her and for the team she leads.
Finding a home at Gapps – between people and technology
Before joining Gapps in 2017, Suvi studied economics and worked at the Cancer Society, coordinating national rehabilitation courses. There she helped set up and support the Society’s first digital rehabilitation course, a hands-on lesson in making technology work for non-technical users.
“I came in to help nurses run the course with remote tools, and that’s where the spark for IT came,” she says. “I saw how much energy goes into learning new ways of working. I wanted to support people who feel unsure about technology, so work becomes easier and things flow better.”
Soon after, she joined Gapps as a trainee in the Google Workspace consulting team, bringing the same mission with her: help people work smarter by making tools and processes usable in real teams.
Responsibility grew one step at a time, from customer projects to project management, and eventually to leading a Google Workspace services team. Today, as a Service Lead roughly some of her time is still customer work (often in a service-manager role on large engagements), with the rest split between resourcing and sharpening delivery.
Her view on tech change is still blunt: it only matters if it reaches everyday users.
“Cloud collaboration tools – and now AI – aren’t just for the propeller-heads. They’re available to everyone, but in busy day-to-day work new ways don’t just happen. We’ve wanted to be the partner that helps every employee actually use the tools,” she notes, describing tailored adoption programs she’s helped kick off with consultants and customers.
Leading a team in the core business – What a Service Lead actually does
Suvi’s work sits where strategy meets delivery. On a typical week she balances resourcing and customer delivery so that plans made in the sales process turn into results for clients and manageable workloads for the team.
“Day to day, it’s about aligning demand and capacity, matching skills and availability with customer priorities, and making sure projects start strong,” Suvi says. “I keep a close view on the pipeline and work with sales and the team to put the puzzle together in a way that’s sustainable.”
Around 40% of her time is still customer work, usually at a higher level.
“In large engagements I act as the service manager, owning the service we’ve sold and steering execution,” she explains.
For example, when a consultant leads an adoption project, Suvi helps kick off the program and co-specs the scope so the right tasks, roles, and timelines are clear from day one. The stakeholder work is steady and close.
“My key partners besides the team are sales, we talk several times a week. I find it important to be easy to reach so we can solve things quickly.”
With other Service Leads and Business Unit Director Tuomas Hulkkonen, the conversations shift from shared capacity planning to clearer ways of working, and the next improvements to tackle.
The point isn’t process for its own sake – it’s enabling the team to do good work at a sustainable pace and ensuring customers see the value they bought. In other words, the same mission she brought to Gapps now applied at scale: help people work smarter.
Growth, trust, and learning every day
For Suvi, the biggest shift in becoming a Service Lead wasn’t the title – it was the responsibility.
“I had to start making the decisions and move things forward,” she says.
Prioritizing and setting direction became part of the job, alongside guiding consultants in complex customer work. Trust is the backbone.
“Responsibility is given early here at Gapps – and if something doesn’t work, we fix it together. It’s never about blaming the individual.”
As a manager, she keeps one-to-ones and team time non-negotiable: support when workloads peak, clarity in project scopes, and room to grow.
“People are different: some need quiet focus, others want stretch assignments. My job is to notice that and make it possible.”
This role grows your professional confidence and builds valued skills in today’s work life: practical change leadership in IT environments, deep Google Workspace know-how, and bringing AI adoption to everyday users, not just pilots or slides.
It’s hands-on, visible, and meaningful: you help a skilled team do their best work and make customers measurably better at theirs.
