About

Michael Theuringer

Founder, Executive Producer

Michael guides Thinkspace’s IA/UX/UI, engineering, strategy, and business teams for entrepreneurial, brand, public sector and agency clients, managing creative and technical teams from concept to execution and evolution.

He combines over 14 years of team leading positions in the digital industries with 5 years of New York agency experience for clients like Tabasco, Motorola, 3M, Balance Bar and Jell-O. Michael combines a keen understanding of what motivates consumers with strategic planning, project management and interactive product creation for Technicolor, The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, Jonathan Louis, The State of California, Cabo Wabo Tequila, Skyy Vodka, Ihop and Disney among many others.

As executive producer, Michael is responsible for designing award-winning customer experiences for Thinkspace’s clients and products by providing direction and day-to-day management to our User Experience teams. He is intensely focused on delivering highly innovative, intuitive and differentiated products at a start-up pace. In conjunction with the technical leadership, he defines design approaches and solutions, accelerates ideas, specializing in implementing intuitive user experiences by making complex systems simple, usable and extensible to meet both clients’ business and creative goals.

He provides leadership and guidance to all project teams, communicating and facilitating change control, resource planning and management, issue management, dependency identification, scheduling and reporting.

Brian Rousso

SVP of Corporate Development

Brian brings over 15 years of experience in business development and strategy for media & technology companies. He has written the business plans for and led both equity and convertible debt capital raises for startups in the music, gaming and education technology spaces, structured music content and music supervisor deals with entertainment companies such as ABC and Jim Henson Co., and negotiated licensing deals with major labels like Warner Bros for music gaming startups. He holds an MBA from UCLA’s The Anderson School.

Ben Duke

Director of Investor Relations

Ben has been involved with numerous start-ups in the energy field, specializing in growth and investment strategies. He has also directed joint venture collaborations in the aerospace industry for the Ishida Research Group through Duke & Nakatani inc. As managing director of the St. George Coal Co., he oversaw all phases of operations, capitalization and taxation planning for independent oil and gas projects. For EnDuke LLC, he was responsible for futures trading and investor relations. At Thinkspace, Ben specializes in market strategies and graduated corporate development as well as project creation and management.

Melissa Lopez

Sr. UX Designer

Melissa brings over 10 years of hands-on experience in interaction design, IA/UX, Visual Merchandising & POS Material, as well as cross-functional project management to Thinkspace. Her deep knowledge of web production processes spans qualitative/quantitative research, rapid prototyping, user testing, content management systems, product development and ecommerce across all screens and a wide variety of industries.

Melissa is a “system thinker”, capable of designing for the holistic ecosystem beyond the screen, leading the resolution of problems at all levels of detail: from the big picture to the smallest detail.

She specializes in immersive experiences from large enterprise apps to branded experiences for B2B, B2C and P2P and provides hands-on leadership to our teams of Information Architects, User Experience Designers, User Interface Designers and Testers. Working collaboratively, she provides thought leadership and the free-flow of ideas among multi-disciplinary teams to bring out the best solutions.

Melissa engineers all Thinkspace workflows and facilitates the creation of the “look-and-feel”, wire frames and prototype development.

Skilled at executing design projects with competing priorities, Melissa combines a keen eye for functional and intuitive design with result driven project and client management, deliverables management and project tracking.

Mandy Wong

UX Designer

As a UX designer, Mandy produces cohesive, predictable and desirable user experience designs to meet the needs of clients and end users. She has a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from DePaul University. She draws upon her expertise in user-centered design to craft solutions bridging core business requirements with the opportunities and advantages of the internet channel.

Mandy brings over 4 years of UX design experience to Thinkspace with a focus on contextual and user research to guide business appropriate experience solutions that delight and excite users.

At Thinkspace, Mandy facilitates the creation of the look-and-feel of our products, creates wireframes and rapid prototypes, interprets requirements and communicates them to creative, business and development teams.

She is an enthusiastic problem solver with excellent visualization and Human-centered design skills, understanding the relationships between people’s behaviors and digital products. She is completely at home with various methodologies from free-hand sketching to white-board facilitation to pixel-perfect wireframing, interaction modeling for web, mobile, and other scenarios.

Her natural calling is to empathize with the user, advocate and satisfy user needs and motivations.

Tod Hostetler

Test Manager

Tod’s 14 years of QA team leadership experience include 6 years in mobile and most recently feature a strong focus on social networking apps for iOS.

Tod has built multiple QA departments for startups as well as build and field special QA teams to achieve strategic goals and support established companies’ growth into new markets.

Tod believes that especially social apps present unique challenges for QA to expand outside of the traditional laboratory approach. Verifying functional requirements requires rigor; living in the head of the end user requires imagination.

At Thinkspace, Tod ensures that all final products deliver an experience as engaging, fast and reliable as that envisioned in the original drawing-board concept. To that end, Tod supports User Acceptance Testing, creates test strategies, test plans and test cases, monitors all test processes and reports status.