{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Near Future Podcast","title":"Ep #10: Ini Abiodun (AirOps): Designing at AI Startup Speed, Personal Workflows, and Palmwine Wireless","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/43aa8406\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3554,"description":"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.\n## Mentioned in the episode\n- [Domingo Widen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/domingowiden/)\n- [Monologue by Every](https://www.monologue.to)\n- [Andrej Karpathy](https://x.com/karpathy)\n- [Wes Kao](https://www.weskao.com)\n- [Lenny’s Data](https://www.lennysdata.com/)\n## More about Ini\n- [Ini’s personal website](https://iniabiodun.com/)\n- [Palmwine Wireless](https://radio.iniabiodun.com/)\n- [Ini on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/inioluwa-abiodun/)\nFind us at nearfuture.works","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/8vUveugi5ZjKDI2pGhMY6ZwBcP7SSSqiqKb9hZCqvHM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9lOGE1/OTk1MmI3NWJjZTAw/Y2EyMWJjODZkODFj/MjI4MC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}