Kerrie Jordan's education in enterprise software began with interviews. Not the recruiting kind, though one of those matters too. These were conversations with customers who had bought complicated systems to solve expensive problems. She would ask what had gone wrong, what changed, and what the change meant to the person explaining it. The answers were less like software documentation than compact business dramas. A process failed. A career hung on the repair. Once, the inciting incident was an order for 10,000 parts when only 10 were needed. Somewhere in that surplus of zeroes, Jordan found her subject.
She had studied marketing at Santa Clara University, with literature also part of her academic life, and arrived in technology without pretending to be an engineer. Her first employer was a product lifecycle management startup connected to the university. The assignment - customer success stories - matched a preference she had already discovered by elimination. During an interview for a Google AdWords job, she was asked what she did not like doing. Jordan said she did not want to stare at a computer screen all day. The role, inconveniently, called for plenty of exactly that. She did not get the job.
The startup offered movement: talking with people, following a knotty problem, writing the resolution. Its acquisition by Oracle carried her into a much larger company, where she spent eight years in product marketing and stayed close to customers. The Google answer looks less like an interview mistake with time. It was an early piece of product discovery, conducted on herself.
The artist and the engineer
The family explanation is almost suspiciously neat. Jordan's mother was an oil painter. Her father was an engineer for a large chemical and materials manufacturer. At home, she and her three younger brothers were taught that family came first. She describes the mix her parents encouraged as compassion and self-expression alongside curiosity, pragmatism, and hard work.
Those are useful ingredients for anyone whose job is to stand between builders and buyers. Enterprise software has its own dense dialect: integrations, data platforms, deployment models, configuration, inference. Customers tend to speak in different terms: time, mistakes, margins, missed shipments, a workday made harder than it needs to be. Jordan made a career in the translation layer.
When she joined Epicor in 2017, the translator moved closer to the machinery. She entered product management and spent the following years working across cloud solutions, business applications, distribution, and retail portfolios. In 2023, she became Group Vice President of Product Management and ISV Partner Programs. Her remit included the company's Cognitive ERP roadmap, an effort to turn enterprise resource planning from a passive system of record into software that can surface insights and recommend action.
The phrase “Cognitive ERP” is corporate language, but Jordan's preferred examples are resolutely practical. Ask the system a question in ordinary language. Find the relevant information without knowing the correct screen or report. Let specialized agents prepare an action, while a person keeps approval. Shorten an implementation. Speed a financial process. Her shorthand for responsible expansion is equally plain: “Nail it before you scale it.”
A product manager enters marketing
In August 2025, Epicor appointed Jordan Chief Marketing Officer. By 2026 her public role combined that title with Senior Vice President of Product. The pairing is unusual enough to reveal the company's intention. Jordan would not market a roadmap handed across an organizational fence. She had helped shape the roadmap.
Her view of the CMO's job carries product-management fingerprints. Start with the customer. Define the real problem. Ask whether the work creates measurable value. Avoid confusing motion with outcome. In a market swollen with AI promises, she argues that trust comes from customer success stories, specific use cases, and proof points. There is a pleasing circularity here: the executive responsible for the global brand is still doing a more elaborate version of her first assignment.
That does not make the new job tidy. Jordan has acknowledged the difficulty of maintaining a consistent message across channels and understanding where demand originates. She has also warned against letting a brand race too far ahead of customers or employees as AI changes. The marketer must describe the destination while keeping one shoe in present-day operations. A factory manager cannot ship a vision statement.
Her 2026 objective is to make Epicor's AI direction understandable and to make the brand more widely known. She says the measure that matters is customer success. Even the company's history became a customer-listening project. Jordan helped document Epicor's five-decade lineage by interviewing longtime employees and customers, giving a software company assembled through acquisitions a coherent account of itself.
Hard feedback, open doors
Jordan's most memorable leadership maxim arrived from mentors who were willing to point out blind spots: be kind, not nice. Niceness can preserve the afternoon. Kindness, in her telling, offers the difficult feedback that improves the years ahead. She wishes she had learned the distinction earlier. Now she treats mentorship as active work, asking leaders to open a door so another person can ask a question and prepare to hear an honest answer.
At Epicor, she founded a women's employee resource group. One of her favorite moments at a company sales kickoff was not a keynote or polished program but an informal breakfast. Women across levels met for coffee and conversation. A Teams channel carries the exchange into ordinary workdays, where questions are usually less ceremonial and more useful.
Her argument about retaining women in technology and manufacturing is similarly concrete. Encourage curiosity early. Give promising people a first chance to manage. Protect flexibility in the middle of a career, when it can be the reason someone remains. Put women in executive and board roles where the next generation can see them. She is interested in the unglamorous infrastructure of belonging.
The host listens for the work
Jordan's podcast, Manufacturing the Future, puts the old customer-interview habit on a microphone. Across more than 50 episodes, she has spoken with manufacturers, supply-chain leaders, entrepreneurs, and operators about technology and the careers built around it. The guests have included a cabinetmaker preserving a family business with AI, a sensor-company founder looking for hidden factory capacity, and small-business voices thinking through tariffs.
The subject is nominally manufacturing. The episodes often wander productively into craft, succession, resilience, training, and the reasons people build things in the first place. That range fits Jordan's account of the industry's allure: creativity paired with tangible results. Manufacturing offers narrative satisfaction. At the end, something exists, moves, fits, or works.
Her public writing follows the same trail from technology to the people expected to live with it. In articles on manufacturing talent, frontline work, supply-chain resilience, and AI, Jordan returns to training, confidence, visibility, and the ability to act when conditions change. She does not treat the worker as a decorative beneficiary added to the final paragraph. The worker is where the system either becomes useful or quietly fails. By 2026, she was describing AI's value less as prediction for executives and more as context delivered to essential workers facing the next decision. It is a modest shift in vantage point with large consequences: from admiring what a model can produce to asking whether a person can use the result before the situation moves on.
It also explains why she resists treating AI as a replacement for the human mess. Jordan supports automation of mundane work and faster access to insight, but she has argued for security, privacy, fairness, transparency, continuous learning, and human supervision. She worries about substituting synthetic exchanges for vulnerable human ones. For a leader excited by conversational software, her boundary is revealing: a convincing machine should not make actual conversation disposable.
Proof before poetry
There was poetry at home, or at least paint and stories. There was engineering too. Jordan's adult work has been to keep both impulses useful. The story gives a technology meaning; the product has to earn it. A brand can point toward a future, but it must remain close enough to the shop floor, warehouse, distributor, or retailer to recognize the present.
That discipline may be why her anecdotes retain awkward details. The lost Google opportunity. The extra zeroes in a parts order. The difficult advice that was not pleasant to receive. Smooth stories are easy to manufacture and hard to trust. Jordan's are about friction, followed by attention.
Now she occupies a job designed to amplify. Yet her strongest instrument remains the question. What problem are we solving? Does it create measurable value? What happened to the person using the system? Before the campaign, before the keynote, before the AI agent takes a suggested action, someone has to listen closely enough to understand the work. Jordan has been practicing that part for two decades.