Product Designer & Builder

John Lorow

I design interfaces and build the systems behind them — APIs, data pipelines, and deployed products, not just mockups. Based in Nairobi, Kenya.

01 Deployed

KickoffAI

Agent-native football intelligence job router — solo design & build, 2025–2026

AI agents need a way to discover, pay for, and complete football-data jobs without a human in the loop. I designed and built the routing layer, payment flow, and data pipeline that makes that possible.

  • Architected a Groq → OpenRouter LLM fallback chain so the router stays reliable when a primary provider is degraded or rate-limited.
  • Built a schema-mapped Wikipedia data pipeline as the primary data source, structuring unstructured football data into something an agent can query reliably.
  • Implemented the x402 USDC payment protocol end-to-end — including the request/response flow agents use to discover and pay for jobs, designing for a non-human user rather than a person clicking through a UI.
  • Deployed to Render with all core endpoints tested and passing; owned the full stack from data schema through API design to deployment configuration.
PythonFastAPIx402 / USDCGroqOpenRouterRender
02 Live

CompareKE

Kenyan telecom plan comparison platform — compareke.co.ke

Mobile, ISP, Pay TV, and streaming plans in Kenya are structured completely differently from each other. The design challenge was making dissimilar plan types comparable on common ground.

  • Designed a normalized data model so plans with different pricing structures, data units, and contract terms could sit side-by-side without misleading the user.
  • Owned the full UX of the comparison interface — filtering, plan-to-plan comparison logic, and information hierarchy for a dense, attribute-heavy dataset.
Next.jsData modelingUI/UX
03 Shipped

NairobiFloodWatch

Real-time flood monitoring dashboard — nairobi-flood-watch.vercel.app

Disaster response needs live, ward-level visibility — but the original data source (X/Twitter API) became commercially unviable mid-build, forcing a full re-architecture of the data layer without breaking the live product.

  • Built a live dashboard combining ward-level choropleth maps, river buffer zones, and road closure overlays for real-time situational awareness.
  • Replaced the X/Twitter API feed with an RSS-based field-report pipeline once the original integration became too costly to sustain — a pragmatic architecture call made under real cost pressure, not a hypothetical one.
Next.js 14FastAPISupabaseLeaflet.js
04 Live

Clipboard / Snippet Manager

Chrome extension — published on the Chrome Web Store

Snippet managers tend to disappear into generic chrome. This one needed its own visual identity while staying fast to search and insert from.

  • Designed a neubrutalist visual system — deliberately distinct from the flat, default extension-popup look.
  • Built category organization, search, and a global command palette for one-click insertion into any input field on any page.
Chrome Extension APIJavaScriptUI design
05 Live

ArabiaRoutes

GCC cross-border driving guide — arabia.arabiaroutes.site

Cross-border road trips across the GCC involve scattered, inconsistent information — insurance, visas, border crossings, connectivity — across six countries with different rules.

  • Designed and built a content-driven platform covering Orange Card insurance, visa requirements, border crossings, and eSIM connectivity for cross-border road trips.
  • Built the underlying programmatic SEO architecture to scale content across country and route combinations.
Next.jsProgrammatic SEOContent architecture

Also built

Chronos Time-series sports prediction system on Streamlit, using Amazon Chronos + Dixon-Coles
Stadium Hopper 2026 FIFA World Cup travel companion — flights, city guides, road trips

Experience

Design Lead — Carbcarbon Jul 2023 – Jan 2024

Pre-seed carbon-offset marketplace. Defined product vision with the founding team; designed buyer and seller flows for a platform balancing tech-savvy urban buyers against lower-bandwidth rural project owners.

UI/UX Designer — Gebeya Limited Nov 2022 – Apr 2023

Designed interfaces and interactive prototypes across client projects, running user research to ground each design in validated need.

UI/UX Designer — ABNO Software International May 2021 – Sep 2022

Designed and prototyped an ERP system used across 5+ institutions of higher learning and 3+ government bodies; led the redesign of a student application portal through to shipped HTML/CSS.

Creative Designer — Pioneer Enterprise Company Jan 2019 – Feb 2020

Designed advertising campaigns, brochures, and promotional materials; owned the company's brand guidelines.