Ep #10: Ini Abiodun (AirOps): Designing at AI Startup Speed, Personal Workflows, and Palmwine Wireless

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This week Jonny moves house, so Tom hosts solo. He’s joined by Ini Abiodun, lead product designer at AirOps, to discuss designing inside a fast-moving AI startup and the systems she’s built to move faster. Ini explains how her 90-day onboarding plan collapsed almost immediately due to pace, and how internal AI assistants like Fantino and Clara helped her learn the codebase, accelerate a listening tour, and ship early, including a widely adopted UX writing “skill” that encodes brand voice, product context, and content rules while diagnosing and rewriting copy. She shares how she spends significant time scaling design via cross-functional relationship-building, joining eval conversations to reduce user cognitive load, and enabling engineers through design reviews. Ini also describes her personal “Oracle” knowledge base in Obsidian/Claude for communication, stakeholder context, daily/weekly routines, and performance tracking. The episode closes with Palmwine Wireless, her interactive 1950s-style online radio broadcasting AI-generated Nigerian instrumentals across decades, plus quick-fire questions.

(00:00) - Intro & Guest Welcome
(00:52) - Joining AirOps: The 90-Day Plan
(05:13) - Building the AI Content Design Skill
(12:38) - Product Design vs. Design Operations
(20:39) - Neurodivergence, Communication & Knowledge Systems
(32:04) - Daily Reflection Practices
(36:22) - Palmwine Wireless: Building a Nigerian Radio
(43:41) - Sound Design Deep Dive
(49:26) - Building the Music Library with Suno
(52:45) - Quick-Fire Questions
(59:00) - Outro & Thanks

## Mentioned in the episode

- [Domingo Widen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/domingowiden/)
- [Monologue by Every](https://www.monologue.to)
- [Andrej Karpathy](https://x.com/karpathy)
- [Wes Kao](https://www.weskao.com)
- [Lenny’s Data](https://www.lennysdata.com/)

## More about Ini

- [Ini’s personal website](https://iniabiodun.com/)
- [Palmwine Wireless](https://radio.iniabiodun.com/)
- [Ini on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/inioluwa-abiodun/)

Find us at nearfuture.works

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