Team

Nick Tietz

Founder, CEO

Nick Tietz has spent the last 15 years working as a serial entrepreneur, innovator, technologist, user experience designer, business and technology consultant. Nick has designed more than 100 apps, crafted the strategy to help redefine the public education experience at Minneapolis Public Schools, and led multiple innovation efforts at Life Time Fitness to improve the employee experience and define the health club of the future as the Director of Innovation. Most recently Nick was the Co-Founder of Vitals Aware Services and launched a new technology service to help people with visible and invisible disabilities communicate with First Responders (Law Enforcement, Fire and EMT).

Additionally, He has spent the past decade donating his time and creative services at multiple non-profits including The Nairobi Leadership Foundation, The Uganda Leadership Foundation, PACER Center.  Nick has also served on the board for Playworks Minnesota, Alternatives-A program for inner city youth, and currently helps StudiOne Eighty at Urban Ventures and both Totino-Grace High School and St. Vincent DePaul School advisory boards.

Anna Stoll

Co-Founder, Director of Customer Experience and Design Innovation

Anna has spent the last 20 years working as a sales professional, marketer, mentor, business consultant, and customer experience expert. Anna is an energetic, passionate human-centered professional who has helped businesses of all sizes, from ‘Ma and Pa’ businesses to fortune 500 corporations like Thomson Reuters. Anna has experience fleshing out product ideas, design, user experience, brand development, and go-to-market plans while gathering customer feedback and communicating with executive stakeholders throughout the process. Anna has also designed and managed Customer Experience programs that include strategy, design, and execution. In 2019, Anna co-authored an Amazon International Bestseller book across 5 countries including the USA, titled Customer Experience, and has developed her own CX methodology that includes the Emotional EKG Journey Map.

David Nguyen, Ph.D

Director of Human to Computer Interaction and other stuff too

David is a human-centered innovator, researcher and tech entrepreneur. His training and experience is in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), Wearable Computing, Mobile Computing, and Cognitive Science in the research, corporate, and startup worlds. David coaches and leads teams to explore and understand a population’s stakeholders — then design for those stakeholders’ functional, social, and emotional needs/challenges. He has bachelor’s degrees from the University of California San Diego, a master’s degree from the University of Michigan, and a PhD from the University of California Irvine. David’s last startup built in-class tools at community colleges to connect students to each other and to their instructors.

Erin Bagniewski

Director of ILT Innovation Lab Operations / International Operations

Erin Bagniewski has spent the last 19 years working as a consultant, implementer, operational design lead, project manager, and people leader. She is an accountable, results-driven, critical thinking, passionate execution director with experience using an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving to improve operational processes and deliver top-quality on-time implementations leveraging human centered design. Erin is a leader in supporting an international non-profits, Africa Strong Inc and is engaged with the Nairobi Leadership Foundation.