Who We Are

My interest in bringing empathy and customer perspective into the business world came early in my life when I was growing up in Moscow. Russians like my grandfather built spaceships and other great things, but the art and science of simple product/service design was virtually non-existent (except for the spaceships; those are pretty amazing.) My early interactions with a customer-unfriendly system fuels my passion to create extraordinary experiences for others.

I have over 15 years of practice in the financial services industry, where I served as a market strategist and customer experience expert. I am also a Certified Professional Coach specializing in change and transition management. Although I am still unable to build any kind of a spaceship (that gene did not get passed down to me from my Russian grandfather), I can help you grow your business through innovative and unique customer experiences.

I am a cultural anthropologist with a passion for understanding patterns in human behavior. I seek to discover why people do what they do, especially since they don’t always do what they say!

At RedSquared Consulting, I have the opportunity to apply my ethnographic expertise to help our clients understand their customers’ needs, behaviors, and motivations. Prior to RedSquared, I was an experience design strategist at a Fortune 200 company and an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, where I also earned my PhD in anthropology. I love to write, to teach, and to inspire, and I have published widely in peer-reviewed journals and books. When I am not championing the needs of customers, you’ll probably find me either researching or getting ready for my next great trip.

Keith Winn served as a senior financial services executive for more than 30 years. Most recently he was Senior Vice President of Member Experience at USAA. There he directed a business unit accountable for delivery of USAA’s banking, insurance and investment products across all channels.

Since then, he has provided advice to participants in financial services and healthcare industries. He has applied his domain expertise to a broad set of functions, including president of a $100+ billion asset management company, Fortune 200 company operational risk committee chairman and chief operating officer of a wealth management business.

Keith and his wife, Linda, have devoted much of their lives to children and families at risk. They served as foster parents for almost ten years as well as holding board positions for foster care agencies. Today Keith is Vice-Chairman of the Board for MedShare International, a humanitarian agency that has delivered medical supplies and equipment to approximately 100 countries.

My path has involved developing computer systems for domains as varied as military logistics, electrical power, medical imaging, and financial services.  Along the way, my resume has accumulated the usual alphabet soup of programming tools (one of them even became my nickname).

In each space, my work has had a common theme: take something complicated, and find a way to make it simpler. That was true for systems used by other programmers or user interfaces for novices.  Always, the goal is the same: find out what the customer needs, and simplify, simplify, simplify.

Michael Powell is a cultural anthropologist and experience strategist, who translates human insights into more compelling customer experiences, strategic innovation and organizational change. Prior to RedSquared, he spent more than a decade leading research efforts at Shook Kelley, an award-winning strategy, design and branding firm based in Los Angeles. He has also worked on consulting projects and ethnographic research in a wide range of industries, as well as co-founding a startup food retailer brand.

Michael is a published writer and speaker on culture and design, for both business and academic audiences. He also frequently works on non-profit projects, applying his unique experience in research, branding and design to tackle important public policy issues. He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Rice University, and lives in Houston, Texas.

As an advocate for understanding and designing toward the Customer Experience, I’ve made it my mission to help companies meet their strategic goals. I do so by making the invisible visible through research, making the complex simple through my unique, human-centered perspective, and bringing understanding and meaning through expert facilitation.

With over a decade of designing successful products and strategies for clients of all shapes and sizes, my passion lies in helping these partners think holistically about driving, and enacting, real change. By bringing the human experience to the surface, I help businesses not only increase their bottom line, but also their longevity through customer loyalty.

As founding partner of CX by Design, my mission is to identify nuggets of opportunity within an organization, reorient its existing systems and structures to improve the human experience, help others extend their thinking, and drive material business advantage.

A passionate believer in holistic strategy and design, I use my extensive business background and deep-rooted expertise in Customer Experience and the Design Thinking methodology to help companies understand, define, and discover opportunities at the intersection of business, people, and technology.

Having designed, built, and successfully sold several companies, I help businesses shape abstract concepts into concrete online and offline products & services that respond to the needs and motivations of real people.

When not solving strategic challenges, I can be found in pursuit of good coffee everywhere.

Firecat Studio’s founder and CEO Susan Price is an internationally recognized user-centered design and communication technologies expert with 20 years in the web industry.

Susan leads the creation of business, marketing, social media and content strategies in collaboration with our clients. She leads user research and discovery sessions, requirements workshops, and content brainstorming. She’s a talented information architect, and writes and edits creative copy. Her background in animation and film gives her an edge in storyboarding animation and multimedia sequences.

Judy Cotter is an experienced design thinker and problem solver with a track record for successfully leading enterprise product groups through digital transformation and winning customer and people strategy. For almost 20 years, she’s been designing services through observing, listening, empathizing, understanding; bringing insights into the points of interaction and designing end-to-end touchpoints where they happen – in person, over the phone, online, on mobile. Judy is driven to explore and learn; she picks up on the trends that matter and inspires those around her to collaborate and grow together. As a student of human behavior and decision-making, she’s able to promote the right new ideas and behaviors just in time to achieve adoption and growth.

During her tenure at USAA, Judy held in roles ranging from Experience Strategist to Design Director, Judy focused on digital and enterprise solutions across business units such as Innovation, Insurance, Bank and Workplace Flexibility. As a Design Director, Judy’s team leveraged human-centered design to develop dazzling solutions to delight employees and members alike. She’s been an advocate for the employee experience before it was cool. Judy recognized the importance of empowering employees to deliver exceptional experiences, and she has dedicated her career to supporting innovative employee solutions that support a flexible, productive, and nimble work environment. She excels at leading critical vision and strategy discussions, evaluating and evolving transformative human resources structures and processes, and moving from identifying strategic opportunities, prioritizing against business goals and landscape, to producing realized wins.

Judy holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Dallas, and is on the TedX San Antonio Speaker Selection Committee and a Speaker Curator, coaching speakers to hone their talk to be the most impactful talk possible.

David Tapia, MBA, FACHE, FHIMSS is a portfolio startup entrepreneur, Partner and Founder at Exegete Healthcare International LLC. He has 16 years of experience in healthcare tech, healthcare management, consulting, and nonprofit sectors. Leveraging extensive experience in leadership and strategic planning, he has assisted startups seeking to expand and similar-sector companies looking for vision, direction, branding, change management, and growth. He has demonstrated success in taking startups to maturity by uniquely monetizing products/services He is nationally recognized and is part of the Innovate Home Health educational series and has spoken to hundreds of healthcare professionals across the nation.

David founded and built a longstanding international healthcare marketing and tech consultancy; established a healthcare-focused services brokerage and business valuation company; provided compliance consulting to post-acute healthcare companies; administered strategic and marketing plans, staffing restructures, reimbursement rates and diversified service lines. He has boosted cash flows through cost reduction and revenue generation and increased high-performance staff retention.

David holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Texas A&M University and a Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Healthcare Management from Our Lady of the Lake University. He is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and is Board certified in healthcare management. He is a Board member-at-large of the South Texas Chapter of the American College of Healthcare Executives. David is an Adjunct Professor at Our Lady of the Lake University School of Business teaching healthcare management courses at the undergraduate and graduate level.