All Things Product with Teresa and Petra

All Things Product with Teresa and Petra

By Petra Wille & Teresa TorresBusinessEntrepreneurshipManagement
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All Things Product with Teresa and Petra episodes

  • Defining What Good Looks Like

    Key Takeaways

    • Defining "what good looks like" isn't new — AI evals are just the latest place that old work shows up.
    • Don't stop at technical performance. An eval suite should measure technology performance, customer value, and business value.
    • Don't outsource your definition of "good" to generic, off-the-shelf evals — define it in your own context.
    • "Good" is context-dependent: a concise answer is right for an expert and wrong for a beginner.
    • Metrics mature the same way every time — from universal (MAU) toward your product's real value-creation moment (e.g., DocuSign getting you to send a document).
    • AI amplifies whatever shape you're already in — automating a poorly-defined product or process just produces more of what doesn't work.
    • Underneath it all is one habit: be explicit about what you expect to happen, so you can test the assumption when you're wrong.

      • Notable Moments

      • "Good is: the customer did something that created value for the customer." — Teresa
      • "Don't outsource what good looks like. Really think about, in your context, what does good look like?" — Teresa
      • "Helpful is my new NPS." — Petra
      • "Even with conciseness, the definition of what good looks like changes with the context." — Teresa
      • "The habit that underlies metrics and outcomes is really just: what do you expect to happen?" — Teresa

        • Resources & Links:

        • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
        • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

          • Mentioned in this episode:

          • Teresa's article on AI evals: AI Evals: A Hands-On Guide for Product Teams — the piece that sparked this conversation, and the earlier All Things Product episode on it
          • XING — the German professional network where Petra watched engagement metrics first emerge
          • DocuSign — used to illustrate evolving from raw engagement to the real activation metric
          • Product Leadership Coaching with Petra
          • An observation Teresa attributes tentatively to Ethan Mollick — but it's actually Dave Kline who posted that we're rushing to automate work that shouldn't be done at all
          • Cal Newport — his idea about how much of our work doesn't actually have impact
            • 18 min
          • Mind-Bending Experiences

            Key Takeaways

            • The experiences that shake us most are often raw, human stories about people finding what's meaningful to them — not polished tales of achievement.
            • "Mind-bending" experiences work like art: you come back enriched even when the ideas don't obviously apply to your corner of the world.
            • A sport that demands 100% of your attention is a rare, restorative escape — and that presence can spark the very energy leaders hope will lead to innovation.
            • Learning a new sport lets people practice being a beginner again: getting comfortable with continuous improvement and with being outside their comfort zone.
            • Stretch people only within the "zone of proximity" — close enough to what they know to grow them, not so far it alienates.
            • Leaders should co-design these experiences with their teams, creating a safe way to surface abilities, disabilities, and comfort levels before planning anything.
            • Mind the room: hierarchy, politics, and cultural norms shape whether people feel safe struggling in front of colleagues.

              • Notable Moments

              • "A word that comes to mind is awe. It's such a little word that has so much power." — Teresa
              • "You go there for new lenses, new angles — thoughts you have never thought." — Petra
              • "I actually moved to Oregon because of this conference." — Teresa
              • "You cannot practice that while checking your email." — Petra
              • "When you push people outside their comfort zone, it has to be in the zone of proximity. If you push too far, it's not helpful." — Teresa

                • Resources & Links:

                • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                  • Mentioned in this episode:

                  • House of Beautiful Business — the immersive, genre-bending conference Petra attends (plus a similarly-minded conference she used to attend in Malmö, Sweden)
                  • World Domination Summit — Chris Guillebeau's conference, tagline "how to live a remarkable life in a conventional world"
                  • Colin O'Brady — the adventurer Teresa half-recalls as "Colin," known for the first solo, unsupported crossing of Antarctica (memoir The Impossible First); fittingly, he's based in Portland — the city Teresa moved to
                  • The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter — recommended reading on discomfort and meaning
                    • 18 min
                  • Training Expectations

                    Key Takeaways

                    • Continuous discovery isn't one skill you pick up in a workshop — it's many skills, habits, and mindsets built through repeated practice.
                    • The core mismatch: people request a service (a talk) expecting a benefit (a capable team) that service can't deliver.
                    • Know-how transfers fast; skills and mindset shifts require a "gym" — practice over time, not a one-hour download.
                    • A talk's real job is to inspire, plant a seed, and paint a picture of a different future — not to change behavior on its own.
                    • Talks deliver most when they're embedded in a longer coaching or training program.
                    • Providers need to communicate the full picture of what mastery takes — even though an honest picture can feel "too hard."
                    • You don't have to become an expert to get real value from the habits.
                    • Open Q&A often surfaces the organizational barriers that must be addressed before any training can work.

                      • Notable Moments

                      • "That's like saying, can you teach me how to be a marketer in an hour?" — Teresa
                      • "The people that are asking for training don't know enough about discovery to know even what training they need." — Teresa
                      • "We need to build the gym and go there." — Petra
                      • "Our job is to paint a picture of a different future. It doesn't create that future." — Teresa
                      • "I'm not poo-pooing the one-hour talk. I'm poo-pooing the one-hour talk as the silver bullet that changes your team's behavior." — Teresa

                        • Resources & Links:

                        • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                        • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                          • Mentioned in this episode:

                          • Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres — the source of the "13 habits" referenced throughout
                          • Product Discovery Basics: Everything You Need to Know
                          • The What & Why of Continuous Discovery — Teresa's one-hour overview talk
                          • Managing-Up! A Guide for Product People to Understand and Influence Leadership — Petra's talk which is an example of a talk that grants permission for a simple, low-risk behavior change
                          • Laerdal Medical — cited as a strong model: a six-month program that pairs external inspirational talks with follow-up training
                          • Train Your Team with Teresa Torres
                          • Work with Petra Wille
                          • "Gym" that Petra build for product leaders
                            • 18 min
                          • Recorded Conversations

                            Key Takeaways

                            • Your memory is not a recording — Teresa's transcripts repeatedly showed her that her confident recollections didn't match what was actually said.
                            • Use it on yourself first. Checking your own transcripts to spot blind spots feels very different from having someone use them against you.
                            • Give people permission to evolve. What someone said three weeks ago matters far less than what they think now.
                            • The same record can be a collaboration tool or a weapon — the difference is intent and the permission to change your mind.
                            • Notes ≠ transcript ≠ truth. Each layer adds interpretation, so don't build a conversation on a record you haven't verified.

                              • Pull Quotes

                              • "My perception of reality is not the same as reality." — Teresa
                              • "Why does it matter what you might have said three weeks ago? Doesn't it matter more what you think now?" — Teresa
                              • "We need to grant each other the right of evolved opinions." — Petra
                              • "My brain just made up a whole new t-shirt that does not exist in the world." — Teresa

                                • Resources & Links:

                                • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                                • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                                  • Mentioned in this episode:

                                  • Meta smart glasses — recording wearables, discussed with some healthy skepticism (Petra hates them btw)
                                  • Granola — the AI meeting note-taker Teresa uses for her one-on-ones
                                  • Tab Benoit — the musician behind the infamous phantom t-shirt
                                  • Become a Better Product Leader: A 52-Week Transformation Journey — Petra’s email course
                                  • Chris Argyris — his work on action science (Action Science: Concepts, Methods, and Skills for Research and Intervention) is cited as a root of adult development research
                                  • Loevinger's stages of ego development by Jane Loevinger who is a developmental psychologist known for her stages of ego development
                                  • Theory of mind
                                    • 19 min
                                  • Unpacking Innovation

                                    In this episode

                                    • The problem with "innovation" as a target. Teresa explains why the word bothers her: when teams optimize for novel ways to serve customers, they often land on complex solutions that aren't the best ones. Petra reframes innovation as reduction — leaving things out, minimizing steps, "innovating on behalf of the user."
                                    • The login timeline. A concrete walk through how one "boring" problem kept getting reinvented: username/password → single sign-on adding a two-step flow → Slack's magic links as a genuine moment of innovation → 1Password making magic links annoying again → passkeys, which most people don't yet understand. The lesson: an innovative solution changes the industry, then stops being innovative — and sometimes the company that changes the game (1Password) isn't even the one that owns the problem.
                                    • Not all innovation is novel to the user. Something can be genuinely novel on one dimension — technical feasibility, a new framework, the business case — while looking completely ordinary to the customer. Novelty on one axis doesn't require novelty on the others.
                                    • The cost of novelty. Beyond R&D, there's a cognitive cost: every novel flow asks users to learn a new system. Passkeys are the current example — friction now, in the hope of less friction later.
                                    • Where good innovation comes from. The "just now possible" moment: in a truly cross-functional team, discovery surfaces a real customer struggle, and an engineer says, "there's a new way to solve that — and it's easier." Petra's pitch for cross-functional collaboration as the source of the good kind of innovation.
                                    • The bottom line. The goal is to solve the customer problem. Innovation is only valuable when it does that. There's a whole industry built around helping companies "be more innovative" — Teresa would rather help them get better at solving customer problems.

                                      • Key takeaways

                                      • Innovation is a means, not the goal — it only matters when it serves the customer better.
                                      • Chasing novelty tends to produce complexity; optimizing for the best solution sometimes lands on a familiar pattern, and that's okay.
                                      • Simplicity and reduction are a legitimate form of innovation.
                                      • Every novel solution carries a cognitive cost — users have to learn it.
                                      • A solution can be innovative for the business or the tech stack while looking totally ordinary to the user.
                                      • The most durable innovation often emerges from cross-functional discovery, not an "innovation department."
                                      • Differentiation through novelty is valuable — as long as you don't drop the "when it serves the customer" part.

                                        • Resources & Links:

                                        • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                                        • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                                          • Mentioned in this episode:

                                          • Dieter Rams / Braun / Apple — design lineage where simplicity is the innovation
                                          • Slack magic links — a genuine login innovation in its moment
                                          • Single sign-on (SSO) — why login quietly became a two-step process
                                          • 1Password — changed the game and made magic links feel like friction
                                          • Jeff Patton — User Story Mapping — nobody asks to "log in"; they want their bookmarks saved and synced
                                            • 15 min
                                          • Trash Can Tracking

                                            Key takeaways

                                            • Trash can tracking means placing trash can symbols along your discovery and delivery boards so that discarded work is tracked as deliberately as delivered work.
                                            • It helps answer two questions leaders and teams ask often: "Are we innovating enough?" and "Is our discovery actually working?"
                                            • The "golden trash can" is what happens when a shipped feature flops and the team removes the code — - Petra and Teresa debate whether that belongs on the delivery board (as wasted effort to avoid) or the discovery board (as learning to celebrate).
                                            • An empty solution-discovery trash can is a clear red flag: it means the team isn't comparing and contrasting multiple options.
                                            • An empty problem-space trash can is more nuanced — it could signal an innovation gap, a command-and-control culture, or, if your strategy and vision are strong, a perfectly healthy filter working as intended.
                                            • Whether customer problems even reach the board depends on psychological safety — can support agents, salespeople, engineers, and customers all bubble problems up to be assessed?
                                            • The trash can also becomes a ritual for retiring "zombie opportunities" — decisions a team made to walk away from a problem that the rest of the org keeps resurfacing.

                                              • Also discussed

                                              • Why saying no to certain customer problems is a sign your strategy is actually working.
                                              • A brief detour into German recycling supremacy.
                                              • A teased future episode: "Unpacking Innovation."

                                                • Resources & Links:

                                                • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                                                • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                                                  • Mentioned in this episode:

                                                  • Illustrations of the discovery and delivery task boards
                                                  • Petra’s blog post explaining the idea assessment: Opportunity Assessment: Do We Want to Invest in Discovering This Idea?
                                                  • Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs) — Teresa's continuous discovery framework
                                                  • How Compare and Contrast Decisions Lead to Better Product Outcomes
                                                    • 21 min
                                                  • Delivery Isn't Free

                                                    Show Notes

                                                    • Petra Wille and Teresa Torres take on the popular claim that AI has made software delivery essentially free — and explain why that framing falls apart the moment you care about shipping something real.
                                                    • Why "building a single thing" getting cheaper doesn't mean delivery is cheaper — especially when teams respond by building far more things
                                                    • The three-week feature spiral: how "free" delivery quietly produces Frankenstein data models, duplicated code in 17 places, and tanked performance
                                                    • Why you still need a skilled engineering team observing and steering what AI produces — and why architecture decisions can't be outsourced to a coding agent
                                                    • Build to learn vs. build to earn (via SVPG): throwaway prototypes for discovery are dirt cheap and great — as long as you actually throw them away
                                                    • The app store paradox: apps released are spiking, but apps actively used stay flat — and how users are getting sharper at sensing "AI app slop"
                                                    • Why AI products are a different beast than deterministic code — error analysis, evals, LLM-as-judge, prompt and orchestration iteration all take real time
                                                    • A candid behind-the-scenes look at building AI-generated opportunity solution trees with Vistaly, and the quality issues only a domain expert can catch
                                                    • The 60–70% trap: getting to a good-looking prototype is fast; closing the last 30% to a trustworthy product is months to years of work
                                                    • The real hidden sentence: "Delivery is free" is almost always followed by "…so taste is all that matters" or "…so discovery is all that matters." Both are wrong. Delivery and discovery both matter — forever.

                                                      • Notable Moments

                                                      "I don't think delivery is free. I don't think delivery will ever be free."

                                                      "By the time you're getting to feature 15, your data model looks like a Frankenstein strategy."

                                                      "The first 60 to 70% is easy. It's a prototype… Closing that last 30% is months to years of work."

                                                      Resources & Links:

                                                      • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                                                      • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                                                        • Mentioned in this episode:

                                                        • Just Now Possible — Teresa's podcast on what's newly possible with AI in product
                                                        • SVPG’s Build to Learn vs Build to Earn — origin of the "build to earn vs. build to learn" framing
                                                        • Vistaly — Teresa's tool for AI-generated snapshots and opportunity solution trees (closed beta → GA)
                                                        • Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs) — Teresa's continuous discovery framework
                                                        • AI Evals & Discovery - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille — Past episode to read/watch/listen on about evals, error analysis & LLM-as-judge — the discipline behind building reliable AI features
                                                        • Claude Fable
                                                        • Facilitation Skills - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille — Past episode where Teresa and Petra talked about how many apps are being added to the app store, but not being used.
                                                        • Taste - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille — Teresa thinks taste is baloney, Petra and her talked about that in this episode
                                                          • 17 min
                                                        • Facilitation Skills

                                                          Key takeaways

                                                          • Retrospectives still work. Agile may feel unfashionable, but the practice of pausing to ask "how are we working together?" is one of the most valuable things a team can protect time for.
                                                          • Facilitation is a skill, not a personality trait. Someone in the organization needs to be good at it — and product people should be learning it, not just relying on an agile coach or scrum master.
                                                          • Team charters go deeper than mission statements. The powerful version isn't "what's our outcome" — it's working hours, communication preferences, and how each person likes to make decisions. Making implicit norms explicit prevents friction before it starts.
                                                          • Task conflict vs. relationship conflict. Task conflict is disagreement about the work. Relationship conflict is about how you work together. Team charters address the second; shared discovery addresses the first.
                                                          • Task conflict is good. It's how teams get to better problem solving. If there's none at all, that's likely a psychological safety problem, not a harmony win.
                                                          • Bring task conflict to the team. What looks like two people disagreeing is often a disagreement others share silently — or one someone else on the team can resolve.
                                                          • Relationship conflict starts one-on-one. Try to resolve it directly first; HR or mediation is the escalation path, not the opening move.
                                                          • Choose your facilitator deliberately. Ask whether context helps or hurts. An embedded agile coach may know too much history to stay neutral; sometimes the product person — or a senior engineer with strong facilitation instincts — is the better pick.
                                                          • Leave your ego at the door. A facilitator writes the headline post-its and nothing else. Skilled facilitators even signal role changes physically — Petra describes one who literally switched chairs to mark "team member" vs. "facilitator."
                                                          • When it's opinion vs. opinion, run an experiment. Design a test rather than escalating a debate.
                                                          • Joint escalation as a tool. Having both parties write down the conflict together often shrinks it — and gives leadership something concrete when escalation is needed.

                                                            • Resources & Links:

                                                            • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                                                            • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                                                              • Mentioned in this episode:

                                                              • Team Radar retrospective method “The Secret Weapon of Retrospectives - the Team Radar” — Petra's go-to format for surfacing what the team thinks about a specific tension
                                                              • Teresa’s article on how teams can create a team charter: Take a Team Approach to Product Delivery
                                                                • 19 min
                                                              • Quality Of Evidence

                                                                What We Cover in This Episode

                                                                • Why product teams are drowning in data — but still making uninformed decisions
                                                                • The danger of projecting your own expertise onto low-quality signals
                                                                • Teresa's "ladder of evidence" framework: as effort goes up, so does value
                                                                • Henrik Kniberg's triangle (Petra's coaching go-to): quantitative data + organizational signal + qualitative insight
                                                                • What Teresa is learning from real interview transcripts at Vistaly — and why many "interviews" aren't really interviews
                                                                • The spectrum of interview quality: story-based interviews vs. direct-question interviews vs. usability preference gathering
                                                                • Why product demos and stakeholder meetings are being mistaken for customer research
                                                                • How to communicate signal strength without discouraging teams from interviewing
                                                                • The strategic product decision behind Vistaly's choice to support imperfect interview formats — and use them as coaching moments
                                                                • Why vibe-coded software makes good interviewing skills more critical than ever

                                                                  • Key Concepts & Frameworks

                                                                  • Ladder of Evidence — Teresa's framework for thinking about evidence quality. Low-effort signals (support tickets, app store reviews, sales call notes) are abundant but carry weak signal strength. High-effort, story-based interviews are harder to collect but carry far more context for decision-making.
                                                                  • Story-Based Interviewing — Rather than asking customers about preferences or opinions, story-based interviews collect the narrative of a specific experience: what were you trying to do, when did this come up, what went wrong, what did you need? This context is what makes evidence actionable.
                                                                  • Signal vs. Insight — Low-quality signals tell you something is worth exploring. They rarely tell you what to build. The risk: product experts fill in the gaps with their own assumptions and get it wrong.

                                                                    • Quotes Worth Saving

                                                                    "We're inundated with these low-value signals all the time, but they rarely carry enough signal strength to actually tell us what we should be building. But they feel like they do." — Teresa Torres

                                                                    "The worst thing you could do is never talk to a customer. The best thing you can do is collect a really rich story about their experience." — Teresa Torres

                                                                    "It is easier than ever to release mediocre software. People need to get better at interviewing." — Petra Wille

                                                                    Resources & Links:

                                                                    • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                                                                    • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                                                                      • Mentioned in this episode:

                                                                      • Teresa’s blog:
                                                                        • Ask Teresa: What Should You Do With Insights That Don’t Come from Customer Interviews?
                                                                        Story-Based Customer Interviews Unlock Missing Context
                                                                        The Ladder of Evidence: Get More Value From Your Customer Interviews and Product Experiments
                                                                      • Learn more about story-based customer interviews in Teresa’s course: Story-Based Customer Interviews
                                                                      • Henrik Kniberg's Triangle — a framework Petra uses in coaching to ensure teams triangulate quantitative data, organizational signal, and qualitative evidence before acting
                                                                        • Minimise the Gap Between Maker and User by Henrik Kniberg
                                                                      • Vistaly — Teresa's partnership for AI-generated interview snapshots and opportunity solution trees
                                                                        • 18 min
                                                                      • Stepping Into Leadership

                                                                        What You'll Learn

                                                                        • Why understanding your organization's definition of leadership is the essential first step — and how to find it even when it's not documented
                                                                        • How practicing "saying no well" builds a core leadership muscle that translates at every level
                                                                        • What directional clarity actually means, why it's the crux of leadership, and how to grow your ability to provide it incrementally
                                                                        • How your planning horizon should shift as you grow — from sprints to quarters to outcomes — and why getting less concrete over time is a feature, not a bug
                                                                        • How tools like the Decision Stack, the Now-Next-Later roadmap, and the Opportunity Solution Tree can support you in communicating at different abstraction levels

                                                                          • Key Takeaways

                                                                          1. Start by understanding what leadership means in your specific context.

                                                                            2. Look for leadership training curricula in your company wiki, ask recently promoted leaders, or look at your company's values and leadership principles. General frameworks (like Petra's Product Leadership Wheel or Korn Ferry's competencies) are great starting points, but your organization's version matters most.

                                                                          2. Saying no is easy. Saying no well is the skill.

                                                                            3. The goal isn't to be a gatekeeper — it's to communicate clear reasoning backed by evidence so that stakeholders can almost reach the "no" themselves. When directional clarity is strong, people can self-assess whether their idea fits before it even reaches your desk.

                                                                          3. Grow your leadership horizon gradually.

                                                                            4. As an IC, start by providing clear direction for your current sprint. Then two sprints. Then a quarter. The further out you look, the more abstract and outcome-oriented your directional clarity becomes — and that's the point. You're moving up the Decision Stack, not just adding more features to a roadmap.

                                                                          4. You don't need a big scope to practice.

                                                                            5. Even on a team with a narrow mandate, the product manager usually has more business context than anyone else. Use it. Practice communicating the why behind the work, not just the what. That habit compounds over time.

                                                                            Resources & Links:

                                                                            • Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
                                                                            • Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

                                                                              • Mentioned in this episode:

                                                                              • Petra's Managing Up talk
                                                                              • Petra’s Product Leadership Wheel - A Framework for Defining and Growing Product Leadership at Scale
                                                                              • Petra’s Become a Better Product Leader: A 52-Week Transformation Journey course
                                                                              • Gallup
                                                                              • FYI: For Your Improvement — Korn Ferry
                                                                              • Claude code
                                                                              • Obsidian
                                                                              • The Decision Stack: How Strategic Clarity Unlocks Organizational Momentum — framework by Martin Eriksson
                                                                              • Teresa’s Product Roadmaps: How the Best Product Teams Plan for Uncertainty article
                                                                              • Now-Next-Later Roadmap — format by Janna Bastow
                                                                              • Teresa’s Opportunity Solution Tree
                                                                              • Powers of Ten — film by Charles and Ray Eames (referenced as a metaphor for abstraction levels)
                                                                              • Amazon’s Leadership Principles
                                                                                • 22 min

                                                                              About All Things Product with Teresa and Petra

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                                                                              All Things Product with Teresa and Petra – Unfiltered, insightful, and straight to the point.