Leadership Team

Gary Heinze’s mission is a simple one: leave the world a better place than when he got here. Leading a company that’s dedicated to helping serve the most vulnerable members of society is just one way Gary fulfills that mission.

Gary is the conductor of the orchestra—responsible for keeping everyone at Northwoods in tune and playing at the right tempo. As president and CEO, he provides strategic direction to ensure the various pieces of the business play in harmony, allowing Northwoods to provide technology solutions that empower human services workers to deliver better outcomes to people who need help.

Gary is always looking for ways that Northwoods can do more, give more, and grow more to be not just a software company, but a place that leaves a lasting and meaningful impact on the world.

Not often do you find a company where everyone—from the very top of leadership all the way down—implicitly trusts each other to do their job, and where micromanagement doesn’t exist. Northwoods, however, has a culture built on trust, teamwork, accountability, and other core values. Our culture is incredibly important to the work we do, and it’s something we work very hard to protect … and that’s where Sarah Edwards, general counsel and chief administrative officer, comes in.

The world doesn’t just need companies that build technology; it needs companies that can find a purpose for the technology they build. That’s why Rich Diers comes to work every day.

Rich believes in “falling in love” with customers’ problems—watching what they do, how they do it, and where they struggle—and then using the insights he collects to create software that helps solve those problems in new and unique ways.

After developing and delivering technology services across several industries for the first half of his career, Don Abney was starting to feel like a solution without a meaningful problem to solve.

Northwoods, however, is creating several of the most socially impactful technology solutions Don has ever seen. Being part of an organization that measures success in terms of helping people, and provides the opportunity to bring over 20 years of experience to bear on such meaningful work, fuels his fire.

Don understands that technology problems are people problems, and that if you’re empathetic toward the humans involved in creating and using software, you’re capable of achieving truly amazing things. As chief technology officer, he works to instill this same belief across product delivery and the rest of the company by setting the vision, strategy, and direction of Northwoods’ product offerings.

Don tends the garden, so our product development, product management, and solution engineering teams can focus on growing and nurturing solutions and customer relationships that deliver true business value and improve outcomes.

Cindy Sheets has spent 30 years helping businesses implement technology to transform the way they operate. She puts that experience to work at Northwoods because she truly believes in what our software does to help children and families.

Cindy’s role as chief services officer is to oversee Northwoods’ project implementations nationwide, while enhancing collaboration and cross-delivery between services and support teams. She leads both the Compass® and Traverse® solutions groups, as well as the practice advisory group, customer success, and technical communication and training. As Northwoods grows, so do the levels of implementations we manage and services we deliver. Cindy is paving the way for a seamless customer experience, regardless of project scope, size, or complexity.

Cindy excels at listening between the lines—not only hearing the words someone says, but also understanding what they’re feeling and how their emotions complete the message they’re trying to convey. This helps her ask the right questions to surface the right information, ensuring every project meets all of an agency’s business requirements and positions them for current and future success.

Nick Patel has spent the past 17 years helping large and small businesses make informed, smart financial decisions. What attracted him to Northwoods is our commitment to collaboration and working together toward a common, meaningful mission. More importantly, working here gives Nick the ability to combine his business and technically savvy with his own personal goal of making sure all children are healthy, cared for, and safe.

As chief financial officer, Nick is responsible for overseeing Northwoods’ financial health to ensure the business is in a position for continued grow, while investing in our people, products, and mission. He focuses on providing Northwoods’ leadership team with the insights and information they need to make data-driven decisions that help to push the company forward.

Every day, every hour, thousands of kids are counting on just one person to give everything they have to make their day a little bit better than the one before. Rich Bowlen’s goal is and always has been to give his very best day in and day out to do the most good for the most kids.

Northwoods’ mission is integral to everything that we do and every engagement we have with human services professionals across the country. Liz Blythe strives to use that mission and channel her passion for working with people to make a positive impact on the human services industry.

As vice president of sales for state government, Liz is focused on creating and nurturing relationships with state human services officials and she is unwaveringly committed to helping them get the right solution for their operations.

With more than 10 years of sales experience under her belt, Liz uses her knowledge to work with state government to recommend what type of technology or solution will improve their workers’ day-to-day work. Her passion lies in being able to prescribe a solution to agencies that will allow them to maximize productivity, make informed decisions, and achieve better outcomes.

Success at Northwoods isn't about the software we sell, it's about the people whose lives we impact by selling it. Michael Drabek thrives on knowing we offer solutions that empower the human services workforce to provide holistic benefits, treatment, and services to the vulnerable people they help.

As vice president of sales for local government, Michael coaches and mentors Northwoods' business development representatives so they can grow and nurture business at the county level.

One of the original members of our sales team, Michael knows the challenges of government buying better than anybody in the business. He uses this insight to lead his team in developing more structured and proactive approaches to selling, while providing agencies with the information they need to make technology decisions that support their mission and position them to achieve long-term success.

Rupam Chokshi is a firm believer that while technology is constantly evolving, it should always be rooted in one thing: solving problems. All the features and benefits in the world ultimately won’t mean a thing if your product doesn’t truly help someone overcome the hurdles that get in their way every day.

Rupam’s keen eye for detail allows him to see all sides of a problem so he can connect it with the right solution. It is through this lens that Rupam approaches his role as director of market research, where he oversees market analysis and segmentation, product positioning and strategy, messaging and persona development, and competitive intelligence. He works closely with the product management and innovation teams to provide clarity around what we should do next.

By ensuring our products solve customers’ most important problems, Rupam helps free up their time to focus on the most important aspect of their jobs: their clients.

Jon Eakins thrives knowing every day he’s counted on to contribute to a company that helps not only the workers who rely on its software, but also the communities in which those workers serve. As part of Northwoods’ services delivery leadership team, Jon is able to do just that.

Jon is director of Compass solutions, where he oversees the planning, staffing, and execution of Compass product implementations, with a focus on economic assistance and child support. He draws on over a decade of experience integrating the Compass suite with agencies’ business processes to provide a complete and comprehensive solution.

Jon has a knack for looking at a project from all sides to understand the key customers involved—How are they wired? What motivates them? Then, he identifies the right team at Northwoods and what skills, support, and tools they need to implement the project successfully and ensure customers are happy. Jon combines his people skills and business acumen in a way that makes the most impact on both the customer and the community.

It's surprisingly rare that a software company considers both its customers and their customers when developing its products and services. Yet Northwoods puts our customers’ clients—in our case, vulnerable children, adults, and families—at the center of everything we do. This differentiator prompted Chuck Barber to join our team seven years ago and has kept him coming back every day since.

A former Northwoods’ customer, Chuck puts his first-hand experience to work so we can make a meaningful impact on not just everyone we serve, but also everyone they serve.

As director of Traverse solutions, Chuck focuses on creating alignment between internal and external partners. He shares input from current customers with our product development team to help them prioritize new features, while working with business development to anticipate future customers’ needs and convey the value we can provide. He also oversees the team that implements all Traverse projects, while sharing best practices to help customers learn and benefit from each other’s success.

It’s easy to make assumptions and judgments about what social workers and caseworkers do. Movies, newspapers, and other forms of media tend to focus on the negative, fueling misperceptions as a result. Tiffany Himmelreich knows for every negative story or outcome shared, there’s an equally positive one that wasn’t … so it’s her job to help tell those stories.

Jason Wintersteller loves to ask questions. His penchant for probing deeper into problems led him down the path to become a product designer and, as the problems he encountered became more complicated and multi-faceted, he found himself more interested in a more holistic product approach.

Social workers and caseworkers have difficult jobs and having inadequate tools makes it just a little harder. Jason believes in making things better by continuing to ask questions to truly understand the problem, helping to envision solutions and design products that address that problem instead of treating the symptoms.

As director of product, Jason oversees the two groups within Northwoods who envision and coordinate not only what products we create, but the strategy and design behind each. His product-centric thinking helps bring focus to product strategy and design, ensuring Northwoods helps position our customers for long-term success.