Meet Our Team
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Brandon Blangger
Co-founder
As Co-founder of Openfield, Brandon helps business leaders and product teams leverage UX research and design to drive growth and reduce risk. He focuses on building a collaborative, adaptable team that thrives on learning and consistently delivers high-impact results. Outside of work, Brandon finds creative fuel in museum trips with his family — where he’s honored to lead the ultimate creative team: his kids.
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Brian Keenan
Co-founder
As a Co-founder of Openfield, Brian’s focus is helping business leaders understand how UX research and design can help them increase revenue while reducing risk and waste. He is an avid student and practitioner of wildlife and landscape photography, which pairs well with his love of road tripping and exploring vast and wild destinations.
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Annie Hensley
Director / UX Design
As Director of UX Design, Annie is responsible for ensuring our team continues to deliver superior client and user experiences that result in tangible business outcomes. That includes fostering collaboration and crossover between our design and research teams, mentorship and career guidance, stewardship of Openfield’s culture and values, as well as, contributing to strategic decisions that ensure our company continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of EdTech clients and users. As an IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), she is committed to ensuring accessibility standards are met by our team. Annie is a lifelong runner and marathon enthusiast who has run the Boston Marathon several times – it remains her favorite race. She is actively involved with Girls on the Run Cincinnati, where she works to inspire the next generation of girls and women in sport. She is also an avid lover of parks of all sorts – theme parks, ballparks, and National Parks (even revisiting Parks and Recreation too many times to count).
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Jacob Hansen
UX Design Lead
In the role of UX Design Lead at Openfield, Jacob’s collaborative approach to helping our clients plan and execute upon key product roadmap priorities is an asset to all those around him. His responsibilities include mentorship and guidance to ensure Openfield staff grow and uphold our standards for excellence. Jacob is a prolific character illustrator, a passion that blends his love of design, fine art, gaming and cartooning in both traditional and digital media. He is a storyteller who is inspired by both film and its history. He’s also a huge fan of Disney theme parks for the visitor experiences they deliver. Additionally, Jacob enjoys running road races, kayaking, gaming and learning on guitar and banjo.
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Tanner Sotkiewicz
UX Design Lead
In his role at Openfield, Tanner brings a passion for technology and creating apps that he developed at a very early age. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Interactive Media Studies with a focus in User Experience Design and a minor in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Miami University. Outside of the office, Tanner is passionate about music, with the electronic genre currently filling his playlists. He’s an avid fan of football, college basketball and soccer, zealously following Openfield hometown favorite, FC Cincinnati, on the domestic front as well as Chelsea FC overseas. In 2014, Tanner achieved the truly impressive and often elusive goal of qualifying for and completing the Boston Marathon.
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Josh Barnes
Co-founder
As a Co-founder of Openfield, Josh’s focus is the finance, operation and human resources systems that serve as the underlying bedrock for our team’s growth. Having completed numerous half marathons and endurance races, he is an avid runner who is always looking ahead to his next challenge. His passion for guerrilla art has earned him recognition as the Banksy of our office.
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Sarah Freitag
Director / UX Research
As Director of UX Research, Sarah draws on her deep understanding of EdTech users and her background in research, design and business strategy to enable our clients to make confident decisions that result in products that solve real needs and create demonstrable impacts on their business’ bottom lines. Like her design-side counterpart at Openfield, Sarah is responsible for fostering collaboration, team development and for bringing new strategic initiatives and methodologies that allow our company to stay ahead of the curve of what EdTech users truly need to realize higher levels of learning and teaching success. Sarah is an avid reader and an adventurous explorer. Highlights from her favorite travels include Morocco, Peru, Italy, Denmark and France. With the recent pandemic-induced reduction in travel, she makes it a point to fulfill her wanderlust with another one of her passions, cooking and baking, by experimenting with recipes inspired by cultures around the world.
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Kyle Bentle
UX Design Lead
As a UX Design Lead at Openfield, Kyle’s calm and thoughtful approach is complemented by his uncanny sense for wrangling and making sense of complexity. As a data visualization expert, he brings a rare ability to analyze and translate complicated concepts and information into engaging and useful stories that help clients and users make confident decisions. Kyle’s approach to UX is informed by a diverse set of professional experiences. After earning a journalism degree from Ball State University with a concentration in graphic design, he spent the next decade working in news organizations in Jacksonville and Chicago. Outside of work, he enjoys time with his wife, Lee Ann, and their dog, Scooter. Among his hobbies are biking, spending time outdoors, and painting poorly (his words).
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Jordan Aguilar
UX Designer
Jordan brings a blend of skills and life experiences that influence him in his role as UX designer at Openfield. A graduate of Miami University’s Interactive Media Studies in Oxford, Ohio, Jordan has worked in design and development roles so he understands the nuances of the relationship between UX and engineering. You don’t need to talk to him for long to learn how important his family is to him. Accessibility and empathy for all users isn’t just a job requirement for him, it’s directly inspired by the people who are closest to him. From an early age, visual arts have been a passion of Jordan’s. He currently enjoys digital illustration, 3D modeling, and experimenting with realism, stylization and abstraction in his work. In a noisy world, he finds calm and focus in simple things such as listening to the sound of falling rain.
