Career growth does not happen in a vacuum. For many, it’s the product of years of study, networking and confidence — plus the right timing.
For Heather Prince, a senior associate product manager at Applied Systems, her career journey into insurance technology began working as a barista in an office cafe. Encouraged by regular customers who believed in her personability and work ethic, she applied and successfully made the leap to insurance. But it wasn’t until 2006 — when she made her way to her first role at Applied Systems — that she knew she had found the right place to grow her career.
Eighteen years later, Prince knows she’s where she wants to be, despite the journey not being exactly linear. In her first role at Applied, Prince took advantage of downtime to consolidate issue tickets submitted to Applied’s project management system, eliminating thousands of duplicates and making her team’s work easier, which drew the attention of company leadership.
“Cleanup work like that gets noticed, and suddenly, I had some upper-management people asking me, ‘What are you doing?’” said Prince.
Over the next 16 years, she moved from department to department, growing her career, forming friendships — and meeting her husband — all while taking advantage of the internal and external educational opportunities at Applied Systems. She took every online course Applied Systems offered and studied insurance policy with the company’s weekly in-person seminars.
Applied’s culture of learning encourages growth at all levels of the organization, and the company provided resources that contributed to Price’s success. Its employee learning support (formerly called Applied University) has evolved into a comprehensive learning management system and offers experiential, social and formal learning opportunities. Beyond a serious drive for continuous learning and self-improvement, she also credits her colleagues and managers for helping her find the next goal to aim for — and for giving her a great place to work for 18 years.
“As a team, we’ve gotten so much done,” she said. “It’s been productive, I’ve learned so much and overall, it has just been fun.”
Built In sat down with Prince to get a clear picture of Prince’s growth journey and understand how Applied Systems’ team helped her grow her career.
Tell us about your path to joining Applied Systems. You left college with a degree in theater, so what brought you to insurance tech?
I was working in downtown Chicago at a coffee shop — a Gloria Jean’s in an office building — doing auditions, and it wasn’t working out that well. These women would come in the morning rush and then later in the afternoon, and I was the only person they would let make their coffee. I don’t know why, but they liked how I made their coffee.
We got talking, and they would say, “You’re too smart to work here. You need to come and work with us.” And I thought they were just blowing smoke. One day, I was having a bad day, and I finally said, “Tell me where you work, and I’ll go fill out an application.” It was a third-party administrator for health insurance, and I applied and got the job.
That role started my career in insurance, and it was also in downtown Chicago. I worked there for three years until a friend got me an interview at a Country Financial insurance outlet, and I started working there. Eventually, another friend told me about an opening at Applied Systems, and in 2006 I started working in policy support for TAM — Applied’s agency management system.
What was it like starting at Applied Systems in 2006?
It took about six months for everything to click, and once it did, things became really fast, and I would blow through calls.
But I like to keep busy, so anytime there was a lull, I would go through our project management system — what we have now replaced with Jira— where we would report defects that needed to be fixed by development. In that system, there were tons of duplicates. I would be very annoyed every time I went in there, noticing so many duplicates and bad entries, so I decided I was going to clean it up. I took it upon myself to combine a bunch of resources and clean up the data, and I ended up deleting thousands of duplicates.
One of the people who noticed what I was up to was the head of escalation, which is the group that handles issues that the support team does not have the time or expertise to handle. She asked me to interview for her team. I did, and I was moved on to TAM escalation support in 2008, two and a half years after I started.
You worked on the escalation team for 12 years. What was that like?
In escalation, we handled the more difficult issues. We could spend as long as we needed on solving issues, even weeks on an issue. We handled all of the application stuff, so it wasn’t unusual to have millions of records in a database to scan through. We also handled the customer relationship tools program, including the beta test for customers, so we worked very closely with a few customers when I started working there.
I realized quickly that I needed more knowledge of TAM, other than just policy. I started taking classes at Applied University in my free time — and I think I ended up taking every online class available for Applied employees. I also took three years of the insurance training that Applied offered, which was an intensive weekly class that helped us get licensed for insurance.
“I realized quickly that I needed more knowledge of TAM, other than just policy. I think I ended up taking every online class available for Applied employees.”
I met some great people working in escalation. It was a really small team — there were only about eight of us — and we were a very close and fun team. I met two of my best friends, who were in my wedding party while working on the escalation team, and I was introduced to my husband, who was a developer working at Applied.
Around this time, I was looking to make another change and decided that I wanted to move to quality assurance. The part of my job in escalation I enjoyed the most was testing the product, and I felt QA would be a good fit for me. I waited for an opening to come up, and eventually I was able to make the move.
What came after QA? How did you make the leap to where you are now?
While I was on the scrum team, I worked a lot with the two product owners on the team, and they were wonderful. I decided that the product part of the organization was where I wanted to be. About two years after I started in my QA position, an opening came up for a policy product owner, and I interviewed for it and got it. I’ve been working as a senior associate product manager ever since. I love the work I’m doing now. I think I found where I want to be. The role is super challenging, but there is always something different with tons to learn.
“I love the work I’m doing now. I think I found where I want to be.”
What factors have made the biggest impact on your career growth at Applied Systems?
Outside of always having educational resources on hand, I’ve been very lucky to have really good managers. My managers have been really good at fostering career goals and helping me reach them, giving me projects to help me that are geared towards helping me move further, pushing me but never pushing me too far and knowing when to give me projects that are a stretch rather than something I can’t do. They have helped move my career forward in a way that also helped the team.
Over the last 18 years, what has inspired you to stay at Applied Systems?
The people. To illustrate, I’d love to share a core memory about the relationships I’ve made at Applied.
Back when I was working in escalation, there was a large office cube that held five or so people. The office management made the mistake of putting my whole team for escalation in there, the five of us.
We were a trouble-making cube. We goofed off a lot, but we got stuff done. It was fabulous to not have walls between us because we could collaborate and talk. You just had to turn around. We laughed all the time. We called ourselves “the Quadra-corns,” like a unicorn with four horns. I don’t know why we went with “Quadra-corns,” since there were five of us. We drew pictures of a Quadra-corn riding an escalator with the catchphrase, “You’ve been escalated!”
We were ridiculous, but we got so much done, I learned so much, and it was just fun.
