Ìní on Designing at AI Startup Speed

Ìní built a 1950s Nigerian radio that lives on the internet. She’s this week’s podcast guest, where we got into all the craft details. Plus, her first 90 days at an AI-speed startup, and the Claude workflows behind her day.

This was a really fun conversation, which left me inspired for what to build next. Hopefully you’ll come away feeling similarly.

A few takeaways:

  1. Her carefully structured 90-day onboarding plan was thrown out by day two. Instead she used the AirOps internal agent to “draw mountains of mermaids” so she could accelerate context building herself.

  2. The UX writing skill she built asks which surface you’re on and what the user is doing there, then tells you what was wrong with your copy before it rewrites anything. It’s now used across product, engineering and design, and it teaches the team rather than just handing over the answer.

  3. She wasn’t initially invited into model eval discussions, but after she realised the outsized impact this was having on users, she invited herself into the engineering rooms to offer her user-centred perspective. Showing up consistently like this quickly got her invited into more technical rooms.

  4. “Design is starting to become the bottleneck. It’s very real.” Her answer isn’t to work faster. It’s to get her engineers building with the design system and then run design reviews for them, so work ships without her needing to manually create every screen. I love this approach to enabling others as a strategy for scaling design.

  5. She calls her knowledge base the Oracle. It holds communication frameworks she built from reading everything Wes Kao has published, Lenny’s archive, and a stakeholder map she can now query. A great tactic she uses: her morning briefing surfaces the promises she made out loud in meetings without attaching a date to them.

  6. On Palmwine Wireless she spent nearly TWO WEEKS getting the sound of rain right. Ìní talks about how rain on a corrugated tin roof in Nigeria has a specific sound, nothing like rain in the West, and everything she generated with AI came back as “the most synthetic nonsense I’d ever heard.”

I was blown away by the attention to detail, especially for something so few people will ever consciously hear. So even if you’ve admired Palmwine Wireless from afar, there’s a lot going on underneath it.

Ìní is one of the most inventive designer builders I know, and there’s plenty more in the full episode, including the night she recorded 80 radio DJ snippets from 11pm to 6am and then binned almost all of them.

Listen to the full episode at nearfuture.works/podcast.