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