How Product Operations VP, Monique Chelsom, Charted a Personal Roadmap to Success at Apryse

Finding a career in an industry that offers consistent learning and growth opportunities can seem elusive, but creating a personal and professional roadmap to success brings big payoffs.

In the sixth installment in our series, we spotlight Monique Chelsom, VP of Product Operations at Apryse. She explains how her past personal and professional experiences brought her to Apryse, where she’s been able to learn and evolve with the company by helping build our product and driving her roadmap to success.

After finishing my undergrad, I looked for a career in a growth industry. I started my professional journey with a job in tech sales in 2007. Wanting a career where I could travel and never stop learning, I landed a role as a Professional Services Consultant with a rapidly scaling Canadian tech company.

I had the privilege of working with Fortune 500 customers, including Cisco, Google, and Disney, on their global proof of concepts of our new enterprise collaboration solutions. This opportunity took me around the world to Spain, Sweden, and China, to name just a few places!

After successfully creating a portfolio of services, I moved into product management and managed their enterprise portfolio of hardware, software, and services solutions. I spent the next ten years in the product manager and people leadership space.

With almost two decades of knowledge in the field, I was offered a fantastic opportunity here at Apryse, where I would lead Product Operations and help design and develop our product roadmap to help product managers and Apryse optimize their operations.

Product Operations focuses on how our Product and R&D teams work to deliver our products. As the team leader, my focus has been on defining Apryse's operations strategy and initiatives. I did this by consulting the product leadership team and working with the product organization to identify opportunities to enhance and drive efficiency.

A typical work week includes working with my teammates on their functional areas, ranging from product process and tool optimization, product team data management and enablement, product security operations planning, and much more.

Product Operations is a new field that is different in every company. In this field, you often create and implement new processes, which require a lot of change management and foundational alignment with stakeholder groups. This part of the role requires a lot of patience and understanding, skills I've worked hard to hone over the years!

Without a doubt, it's been creating the centralized roadmap for the product team and Apryse!

Apryse recently implemented a standardized and centralized roadmap in our core tool Jira. What's fantastic about this roadmap is it's a real-time view of what the product team is planning and what is currently being developed and delivered.

This has revolutionized the roadmap, transforming it from a static and subjective view in PowerPoint to a live, data-driven roadmap that contains all the work of R&D and product teams.

One surprising thing is how organic things have been, including our growth and development of internal processes. The foundation we’re currently building on was developed by many hardworking individuals who paved the way for what we’re doing now, which is the formalized development process that is essential to a rapidly scaling company!

My main piece of advice is if you don’t know the answer to something, don’t be afraid to ask questions — everyone at Apryse is here to help you succeed!

Also, you should always think like a Product Manager and continuously ask "why" things are being done the way they are — this fosters an environment where we can continue to evolve and optimize how we do business.

Learn more about our culture and community, as well as current opportunities, on our careers page.