Jen Alstad

Jen Alstad is the President and a co-founder of bswing.  Her work focuses on helping organizations understand the people that they serve as well as building ways to engage them in the creation of products, services, and solutions.  bswing works to understand root causes and the complex ways that systems work (and fail) for people.  Our firm has been deeply engaged in insights, consumer product development, service design, and innovation to improve human experiences. 

Jen’s secret power is her ability to see the big picture and carve out ways to make progress even when things are complex.  Jen loves to engage people and solve problems that are vexing and frustrating.  She’s known for her ability to dig in and understand new problem spaces.  She is curious, a learner and is extraordinarily skilled at arranging and sequencing work so that goals can be accomplished.

Her experiences include work on the some of the first interactive tools including the first online access program for a brokerage firm (Piper Jaffray, A.G. Edwards, US Bank, RBC Dain Rauscher), the first information system for voters (League of Women Voters & Harvard’s Shorenstein Center) as well as large commercial products for industry leaders including Ameriprise Financial, Allina Health, Toshiba / Landis + Gyr, Wolters Kluwer Clinical Health, Health Language, Target, CH Robinson—and several Fortune 100 companies we cannot name.

Jen serves on the Board of Directors for Allina Health and chair the Quality & Population Health Committee. Prior experience includes board service on Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, the Bush Foundation, the University of Minnesota Foundation as well as serving as an advisor & mentor to many startups including Kintsugi Health, River Health, TechStars MedTech, the UHC Accelerator. She served on the advisory board for Tundra Ventures which spun out of Lunar Startups. She also helped found the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, Forge North (supports entrepreneurs in Minnesota’s ecosystem).  She lives in Minneapolis with her husband Eric and two teen daughters.