Guest Bio: Ashley Jablow
Ashley Jablow is the Founder and Principal of Wayfinders Collective and creator of Life Design School, a creative studio dedicated to helping leaders and professionals redesign their work and lives with human-centered intention. Rising to prominence in the 2010s through her work at the intersection of design thinking, civic innovation, and leadership development, she became known for translating the methods of the world’s leading design consultancies into practical frameworks for individuals and organizations navigating change. Since founding Wayfinders Collective in 2017, she has accumulated 500-plus hours of coach training through the Coaches Training Institute and built a practice spanning executive coaching, organizational facilitation, and on-demand learning resources.
Previously, as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama Administration, she embedded with federal agencies to bring human-centered design methods into government — most notably at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she studied workflow bottlenecks in the Office of Pesticide Programs, and at the National Archives, where she led open design of technology for citizen access to historical records. The fellowship, originally a one-year commitment, permanently relocated her family from San Francisco to Virginia. She subsequently served as Vice President of Development & Impact at Vizzuality, a Spanish data visualization and design firm, where she was their first U.S. hire and launched the company’s inaugural American office.
Earlier in her career, she joined IDEO as the first full-time hire on the OpenIDEO platform, a global crowdsourcing initiative running online design challenges for social and environmental impact. She holds a BA in Sociology and Spanish from the University of Michigan and an MBA in Marketing and Corporate Responsibility from Boston University.
As creator of The Clarity Kit, a free 30-minute on-demand workshop available at lifedesignschool.co, she helps participants identify the core problem they need to solve before entering solution mode — applying the same diagnostic rigor she developed across IDEO, government, and consulting to the challenge of personal reinvention.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There’s a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you’d share it with someone who’d get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to listen to. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newsletter (Taste Maker) to distill the principles and reflect on the narrative — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
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PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at caden@hey.com with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
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