Ashley Maguire

Ashley owns product, design, and go-to-market at Helen’s Foundry.

She started as a software engineer at the NRO and Sandia National Labs, then became the first design hire at Descartes Labs. At Dragos she led product and design for industrial control system security. Her PMs there knew the domain cold, so they built a feature on their read of what customers wanted. The operator they tested it with had no use for it and described something much simpler she had wanted all along. Expertise had made the wrong premise harder to spot.

She also published the UX Competency Matrix. It looked like a career-ladder document, but the point was pay. Levels and roles had to be written down and tied to demonstrable skill before anyone could talk honestly about what people should be paid, and pulling that judgment out of managers’ heads and into a shared structure was the whole exercise.

That is the same problem Helen’s Foundry solves at a different scale. When the current decision lives only in the head of whoever was in the room, the organization loses it the moment that person gets busy or leaves. Agents make that failure faster and cheaper to commit, since they will read the superseded doc with total confidence and build against it. The Helen’s Foundry thesis covers the longer version.