Ashley Maguire

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

She started as an engineer, working for national security customers through General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, then built program and public data sites for Sandia National Laboratories through SAIC and Clover Leaf Solutions. She moved into design at Descartes Labs as a user experience strategist, and was director of user engineering at Dragos, in industrial-control-system security.

She holds an MS in human-computer interaction from Iowa State and an MBA from Cornell Johnson, where Helen’s Foundry went through the 2024 Johnson Summer Startup Accelerator. The company later completed Scale Up New Mexico’s C-Suite Sprint.

The story she tells about Dragos is where the company starts. Her PMs 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 published the UX Competency Matrix in January 2020, under the byline Ashley Richards Otero. 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 Agents make that failure faster and cheaper to commit, since they will read the superseded doc with total confidence and build against it.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.

She and Justin Poehnelt worked together at Descartes Labs, overlapping for about eighteen months starting in 2018. She recruited him as technical co-founder; he left Google and joined full-time in May 2026. They divide the company the way the problem divides: he builds the infrastructure that moves work at scale, and she keeps it pointed at the right thing, after a career watching organizations build the wrong thing because checking the premise was nobody’s job.