Michelle Champagne has chosen a job that begins with finding the business she wants to run. In July 2026, she joined The Brydon Group as a CEO-in-Residence, bringing together two kinds of experience that can sit awkwardly beside each other on a résumé: advising companies from the outside and making decisions from within. Her focus is GovTech software and services. The next step is to acquire a company and take the CEO seat.
There is an appealing complication in that assignment. Before she can decide what to do with a business, she has to decide which business deserves years of her attention. A transaction has a closing date. Running the company has a Monday morning. Her career has been moving steadily toward the latter.
Champagne put the transition in terms of two questions: what makes a business great
and what it actually takes to build one
. She associated the first with Bain and the second with Lexipol. Together, they give her next chapter a practical shape. The analyst’s judgment will have to share a desk with the operator’s responsibilities.
Before the company came the numbers
She began her career as a CPA in Canada. Accounting offers a particular vantage point on a company: the activity has to become something that can be examined, reconciled, and explained. It is a useful starting discipline for someone who will later work around acquisitions. An attractive business story still has to survive a look at the books.
Champagne’s path then took her to NYU Stern for an MBA. Her professional trajectory crosses finance, strategy, and software, fields with different habits of attention. Following those responsibilities tells a more interesting story than simply counting promotions. Each brings another part of the enterprise into view.
Her time at Bain lasted more than six years. There, her work included digital product development and long-term growth strategies. Both require choices about what a company should become. A digital product makes those choices tangible: someone must decide what the customer needs, what the company can deliver, and which ambitions belong further down the list.
A chapter in digital products and long-term growth strategy before the move into operating.
The arithmetic is easy to admire from a distance. A new product, a new market, a promising growth plan. Implementation introduces the personalities, trade-offs, and competing demands that arithmetic tidily leaves outside the room. Champagne’s subsequent operating role would bring those demands closer.
The roadmap becomes your problem
In January 2024, Lexipol announced Champagne as its Vice President of Solution Management. Her brief was to help develop strategic innovations for its customers in public safety and government. The move placed her inside a company whose products served people with work to do beyond the software itself.
That is a consequential change in perspective. A recommendation can be delivered and discussed. A product has to be maintained through all the discussions that follow. Customers return with questions. Colleagues discover dependencies. The roadmap becomes a living list of promises and decisions, with very little respect for the elegance of its original formatting.
One glimpse of Champagne’s work comes from Charles Hitt, who thanked her for guidance as his team prepared a policy management platform for launch. His account described a shared undertaking, with several colleagues helping carry it forward. Champagne appears there in the working company of people building something, rather than in an abstract list of executive capabilities.
There is a reason that detail belongs in her story. Product leadership can be hard to see from the outside. The launch is visible; the preparation is dispersed across people and decisions. A colleague remembering the guidance behind it offers a narrower, more human view of what the job involves.
- CanadaAccountingThe financial view
- BainStrategyThe growth view
- LexipolProductThe delivery view
- BrydonCEO searchThe next responsibility
A useful lesson in making things easier to use
A separate public acknowledgment connected Champagne to Lexipol’s work with Echelon Front. The company integrated the Extreme Ownership leadership training series into its core Online Training offering, having previously offered it as an add-on. Jason Blais congratulated Champagne and other members of the teams involved.
The change is specific enough to be interesting. Training that customers once accessed through an additional arrangement became part of the main offering. Product decisions often concern this sort of boundary: which things belong together, which remain separate, and how much complexity the customer should have to manage.
For an executive considering an acquisition, such questions will recur in different forms. There may be an appealing opportunity to broaden a service. There may also be a good reason to keep the existing product simple. The decision has to account for the people using it, the people delivering it, and the business supporting both.
Champagne’s operating experience gives that part of her career its weight. It puts product work into a story that could otherwise be told entirely through finance and consulting. The software has users. The strategy has an implementation. The executive’s next decision inherits the consequences of the last one.
The search comes before the seat
By the time she arrived at Brydon, Champagne had become a Bain Associate Partner and had led product at Lexipol, with responsibilities spanning strategy, M&A, and development. Her next role combines the acquisition question with the operating assignment: choose a business, then help determine its future.
Brydon’s CEO-in-Residence program supplies committed capital, strategic guidance, operating playbooks, and a peer community. The firm says it targets more than $30 million of equity behind each platform. That is a program target, rather than an amount announced for a Champagne acquisition. It describes the setting in which she is searching.
The acquisition is a decision about what comes next. So is every product meeting that follows it.
Editorial perspective
The program’s structure is worth understanding because it changes the opening task. An executive joining an established company receives an existing collection of obligations. A CEO-in-Residence must first identify the company whose obligations she is prepared to accept. Choosing becomes part of the leadership job.
Industry knowledge matters at that stage. So does a willingness to keep learning. A familiar sector offers somewhere to begin the conversation; the particular company will supply the details. The business that looks coherent at a distance contains employees, customers, routines, and decisions that deserve a closer look.
The relationship survives the signature
Champagne has also described a concern about public sector vendors: the customer relationship can deteriorate after a contract is won. In reflections on the BRIDGES conference, she argued for continued attention to a buyer’s local needs. A signature should leave the conversation open.
That observation belongs beside her acquisition ambition. A business can be attractive to a buyer while still having work to do for its own customers. The two relationships meet when an operator takes charge. The people who agreed to buy the product will continue judging it through their daily experience.
the needAgree
the workDeliver
the serviceKeep
listening
Consider the ordinary questions that remain after a purchase. Does the product do what was promised? Can the user get help? Does the next version address a real problem? These are hypothetical questions, but they describe the work any operator has to anticipate. They are also useful questions to bring into an acquisition search.
A company’s future arrives through decisions of this size as well as through major transactions. Someone chooses a priority. Someone returns a call. Someone notices that a customer keeps asking the same thing. There is plenty of room here for financial discipline and product judgment to work together.
A company worth spending your Mondays on
Outside work, Champagne walks her dog Dolly P. and cheers for the New York Liberty. They are small details, but welcome ones in a career story populated by acquisitions and operating responsibilities. A dog’s schedule, at least, is unlikely to be impressed by a new job title.
Her professional ambition is concrete: find a GovTech business, become its CEO, and grow it with Brydon’s support. It brings her earlier roles into a single prospective assignment. Understanding the numbers, judging the opportunity, and deciding what to build will all belong to the same working week.
That makes the choice of company unusually personal. The search concerns an asset and a future workplace, a transaction and a collection of relationships. The eventual CEO will have to spend time with the details that first made the business interesting, and with the details that only become apparent once the work begins.
Champagne has reached the point where the next career move involves choosing those details for herself. The deal will mark an arrival. Then comes the less ceremonial part: another customer question, another product decision, another Monday. She is looking for the business where she wants to answer them.