Product management organizations play a critical role in ensuring the success of any business organization, especially in technology-driven enterprise companies where market trends can change very rapidly. At this week’s Inforum event in New York, Christina VanHouten (pictured), senior vice president of market strategy and product management at Infor Inc., shared insights into how her organization approaches innovation in a quickly evolving market.

“We sit in between the people who make products and the people who sell products. We sell products by really understanding the market and what is needed for a particular industry, even for a particular role,” VanHouten said. “We work with our customers, we work with our prospects, and we work with the executives to understand the innovation initiatives they want to do, and we drive roadmaps. We then work really closely with our development teams to release our products.”

VanHouten spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, about Infor’s quest to drive innovation in the enterprise.  (* Disclosure below.)

Fostering innovation in a complex environment

Infor has a wide range of products spanning global markets and multiple industry verticals that require careful planning in order for organic innovation to occur, VanHouten explained.

“Infor has this ecosystem of products that have been acquired over time, and it is this rich opportunity to look at all the teams and what they had built. … We had to really be deliberate about how we facilitated engagement and how we brought those teams together to figure out how we were going to integrate these products and the user experience,” she said.

In order to drive innovation within her organization, VanHouten looks for specific types of candidates to be a part of the team that have the ability to self-navigate and get things done in a complex operating environment.

“There are three areas of strength I see. One is domain experience in a particular product or industry, one is domain in the role and the third is the ability to be entrepreneurial and go above and beyond. … More and more we’ve been able to attract that kind of person and in some cases maybe evolve people to see things that way,” VanHouten concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2017. Neither Infor Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE