Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Exit Interview #5: Designing My Life After Tech

Thursday, February 19, 2026 • Rosenfeld Community

This video is featured in the Exit Interviews playlist.

Share the love for this talk
Exit Interview #5: Designing My Life After Tech
Speakers: Ashley Sewall
Link:

Summary

What happens when the career you worked hard to build no longer fits the life you’re living? In this session, Ashley Sewall shares her decision to step away from senior UX leadership and the questions that followed. She reflects on burnout, identity, ambition, and the often-unspoken pressures of staying in tech—and explores what it looks like to apply design thinking to your own career. This is not a story about quitting, but about redesigning work to better align with values, health, family, and curiosity.

Key Insights

  • Ashley experienced a gradual disconnection from her UX leadership role due to bureaucracy and politics, leading to exhaustion and a shift in career priorities.

  • She used a highly systematic, research-driven approach—including AI tools and extensive data mapping—to explore over 60 career options.

  • Transferable skills from UX research, like pattern recognition and customer experience design, apply strongly to real estate and other new ventures.

  • Real estate, despite being a mature field, feels less structured and more entrepreneurial than UX, offering a 'choose-your-own-adventure' career experience.

  • Ashley emphasizes the difficulty of unlearning productivity- and identity-driven mindsets from high-pressure tech environments.

  • Her pivot focuses on tangible, human-centered work that feels more directly impactful and aligns better with evolving personal values and family life.

  • Flexibility and multiple income streams are critical to modern career stability, rather than strict adherence to a linear path.

  • Significant health improvements, including normalized blood pressure and better sleep, followed Ashley's departure from her high-stress tech role.

  • Stepping sideways or away from a leadership track is valid and can be necessary to rediscover purpose and align with life changes.

  • Ashley advises tuning into internal signals of misalignment early to avoid exhaustion and encourages small, low-risk experiments to explore new paths.

Notable Quotes

"On paper, everything looked great, but day to day I felt increasingly disconnected from the parts of work that energized me."

"I was so desensitized to the stress and urgency that it just became my baseline for living life."

"I gathered information and ran little experiments on myself across dozens of jobs to see what might fit."

"Real estate is like the Wild West. It’s very mature but also very unstructured and full of freedom."

"I’m trying to separate who I am from what I produce and the roles I hold."

"Stability today is more complicated than staying on a fixed path; adaptability and diverse skills bring security."

"I didn’t realize how much cognitive load I was carrying until I stepped away."

"Teaching yoga and working in real estate brings me tangible connection to people that I missed in tech."

"Transitions can be long. I wished I had known that the identity shift is harder than the skill shift."

"If you are questioning your path, that’s data. It’s a sign something needs to evolve and that’s okay."

Ask the Rosenbot
Melinda Belcher
Bridging the Gap: Making the Most of the Differences Between Agency and Enterprise
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Chris Hodowanec
Agile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Feleesha Sterling
Building a Rapid Research Program
2023 • Enterprise Community
Aditi Ruiz
A PM State of Mind: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 1
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Lavrans Løvlie
Ask me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Jenny Price
From Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Bria Alexander
Theme Two Intro
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 1: The new product journey
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Ren Pope
Building Experiences for Knowledge Systems
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Llewyn Paine
[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Vicky Teinaki
Short Take #3: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Himanshu Bharadwaj
If design had a heart
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Megan Blocker
Theme 2 Intro
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
Beyond insights: Rethinking the role of researchers as stewards of organizational wisdom
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Andrew Webster
Scaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold

More Videos

Rebecca Gimenez

"Brian Chesky does what Brian Chesky wants — he tweeted our blueprint, and we had nothing to do with that."

Rebecca Gimenez

Work in Progress: Service Design at Airbnb

December 3, 2024

Lada Gorlenko

"Designers can be first responders, not just in digital but in real disaster situations."

Lada Gorlenko

Theme 2 Intro

June 9, 2022

Brigette Metzler

"Put more in than you take out — that’s the rule of thumb I give for contributing to repositories."

Brigette Metzler Dana Chrisfield

Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community

August 27, 2020

"Align on what you’re looking for before the interview to evaluate non-traditional candidates fairly."

Discussion

June 9, 2017

Sarah Brooks

"People implementing policy see the problems with the policy long before anyone else does."

Sarah Brooks Jennifer Pahlka

Fireside chat with Sarah Brooks and Jen Pahlka

October 21, 2021

Lisa Spitz

"Since March 2020, we’ve actually conducted all of our interviews remotely, which generally makes scheduling with diverse groups easier."

Lisa Spitz Nikki Brand

Building Trust Through Equitable Research Practices

November 18, 2022

Theresa Neil

"You don’t need an MD or PhD to be effective in healthcare UX; humility, curiosity, and preparation are essential."

Theresa Neil

Designing for Wellness: Specializing in Healthcare

May 22, 2024

Maverick Chan

"This process isn’t about replacing designers, it’s about augmenting and amplifying what we can do."

Maverick Chan Claire Lin

From Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner

October 23, 2025

Alla Weinberg

"Safety is a state of our nervous system, not simply a feeling or relationship."

Alla Weinberg

Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It

September 8, 2022