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In this episode of the UX Institute Podcast, I speak with Barry O’Reilly — author of Lean Enterprise and Unlearn, and co-founder of venture studio NobodyStudios — Barry joins us to talk about why he’s not chasing unicorns, and why “boring” AI businesses might be the smartest bet in the next decade.

Barry shares his journey from accidentally falling into programming in Dublin, Ireland to working on products such as Citysearch in the first dot-com wave, ThoughtWorks during the rise of Agile and Continuous Delivery, and finally into building a venture studio aiming to create 100 AI companies in five years. We dig into why most VC funds aren’t returning capital, why enterprise AI sales are a trap for early-stage startups, and how smart founders are using AI to build lean teams that still ship meaningful products.

We also get into why current AI UX has a long journey to go, how design will become the key differentiator on top of LLMs, and what product and UX teams might actually look like in 3–5 years.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Barry went from engineering student in Dublin to author, advisor, and venture studio founder
• Why Nobody Studios focuses on health, wellness, e-commerce, and EdTech for AI opportunities
• Why “boring” but proven business models are often better than hype-driven AI ideas
• How tools like Lovable and similar “one-person billion-dollar company” platforms are great for prototyping but dangerous for production
• The studio’s strategy of building companies cheaply and selling early, instead of chasing unicorns
• Red flags in AI startups: vanity metrics, no learning loops, brittle tech stacks, and vague “proprietary data”
• Why early-stage founders should avoid long enterprise sales cycles and niche down to a very specific use case
• How Barry uses his own AI stack (meeting copilots, scripts, automation) to dramatically increase personal and organisational productivity
• Why UX and product design on top of AI will likely be the biggest competitive advantage in the next 5–7 years
• How roles for designers and product managers may shift away from pushing pixels in Figma toward higher-level problem solving and LLM-powered workflows
  
  

Barry O’Reilly

Author of Lean Enterprise and Unlearn, entrepreneur, advisor, and co-founder at Nobody Studios, a venture studio on a mission to build 100 companies in 5 years.

• Barry’s books: Lean

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In this episode, we sit down with Mendigas from the Lovable product team — a non-traditional designer, community builder, and AI super-user who went from recruiting in Dublin to quietly influencing how thousands of creators build products today.

We unpack what the next 3–5 years will actually feel like for designers, UX researchers, PMs, and product builders in an AI-native world. From the death of traditional workflows, to why “playing daily” with AI tools is the best investment in your career, to how companies are rethinking hiring, prototyping, validation, and creativity, this conversation goes well beyond surface-level commentary.

Whether you’re excited, anxious, skeptical, or overwhelmed by the flood of AI tools — this is the grounded, deeply practical, and surprisingly energising conversation the design community needs right now.

In This Episode

• Mendigas’ non-traditional path from Dublin recruitment to becoming a community builder at InVision, On Deck, Koho — and now Lovable.
• How he used AI coding tools to turn a Sunday idea into a Thursday paying customer.
• Why AI-native workflows will replace 70% of today’s design toolchain.
• The decline of Figma for many real workflows — and why it’s become a “graveyard of pain.”
• Why non-technical creators will be the next wave of builders.
• What AI is actually good at today (and what it’s terrible at).
• The new shape of product roles: designers who think like PMs and build like engineers.
• What designers should slowly adopt, how to learn, and how to avoid the anxiety spiral.
• Why play, not pressure, is the single most important learning approach.
• How mid-60s taxi drivers and teenage app builders are already entering the AI wave.
• What the next UI paradigm might look like — and why design remains the superpower.
• The hard questions: Are we building only for ourselves? What happens to jobs? Who pays whom in an automated world?
  
  

Who This Episode Is For

• UX researchers wanting to evolve beyond documentation.
  Product designers feeling the pressure of an AI future.
• PMs exploring faster, AI-driven validation and prototyping loops.
• Founders wanting to ship faster with fewer technical bottlenecks.
• Designers craving clarity, direction, and grounded advice — not hype.
  
  

Why This Episode Matters

AI is no longer theoretical. Designers are already being hired specifically because they know how to build with AI. Non-technical creators are shipping production apps in hours. And legacy workflows are evaporating faster than most teams realise.

This conversation reframes the fear, cuts through the hype, and gives you the playbook, mindset, and realism needed to thrive — not just survive — in the next era of product creation.

Mindaugas Petrutis

Mindaugas Petrutis on Linkedin

Helping more people build things - now go make something lovable → http://lovable.dev

Working in a small team of serial founders, physicists, and ioi gold medalists who all care about building a great product and shipping fast, towards letting anyone create and maintain software – using plain English.

Team previously built the world's most popular open source codegen project (50k github stars).

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UXI (UX Institute) Original Podcast 2025.
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On this special episode, your usual host Mark Swaine, sits down as a guest on the Better Tech Leadership podcast to unpack some of the biggest shifts happening at the intersection of UX, product, and AI.

"Building software today isn’t hard — what’s hard is building the right thing, in the right way, at the right time." – Mark Swaine

Drawing from his years leading UX and product across SaaS, VC, and fintech, Mark offers a front-row view into the critical patterns he sees in early-stage startups — and how many of them are sleepwalking into avoidable mistakes.

This is a candid, insight-packed conversation for anyone working in product, UX, or early-stage tech.

· Learn why most startups have to "rebuild" after launch — and how better UX thinking upfront can save years of technical debt and budget waste.
· Understand the real role of UX in venture capital — and how Mark uses his product lens to evaluate whether a startup has what it takes.
· Discover why the future of design isn’t in pixels — it’s in prompts, strategy, and systems. Mark shares how AI is shifting the designer’s job from flow builder to strategic director.
· Hear what founders get wrong about AI — especially the common trap of confusing automation for true generative value.
· Get practical advice on building smarter roadmaps, aligning teams, and avoiding the trap of enterprise sales cycles that strangle growth.
· Explore what Ireland’s startup ecosystem needs next — and the urgent opportunities we’re missing to stay globally competitive.

Whether you’re a UX leader, founder, or future product director, this episode will change how you think about the road from design to delivery — and the mindset needed to lead through uncertainty.

Connect with Mark Swaine:
UX Institute: https://uxinstitute.com/
Mark on Twitter: https://twitter.com/UX_UI_Guy

This episode was originally recorded on the Better Tech Leadership podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0M4r4dUW4tzN8L9FjNgvrK

The UX Institute Podcast is produced in partnership with Podlad.com

Support the show

UXI (UX Institute) Original Podcast 2025.
www.uxinstitute.com