All Things Product with Teresa and Petra

AI evals feel like a brand-new skill — but the hardest part is a question product teams have always had to answer: what does "good" actually look like?

Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dig into Teresa's recent article on AI evals and the one idea in it that hasn't changed at all. Teresa argues that measuring the quality of AI outputs is really the same work as defining outcomes, writing a PRD, or instrumenting a product — and that teams keep repeating an old mistake: measuring technical performance (uptime, speed, "was it concise?") instead of whether they actually created value for the customer. Drawing on the evolution of engagement metrics, a DocuSign example, and why a student and a professor need opposite definitions of "concise," they make the case for defining "good" in your own context — and never outsourcing it to off-the-shelf evals.

A grounding listen for any team worried they're falling behind on AI: much of the work is the work you already know how to do.

Team events are making a comeback. After years of remote work and tight budgets, companies are bringing people together again, and many are looking for experiences that go beyond the usual offsite. So should companies deliberately send their people somewhere strange, uncomfortable, and awe-inspiring, and what actually happens to a team when they do?

Petra Wille and Teresa Torres trade stories about the experiences that quietly rewired how they see the world. Petra shares the art-like, genre-bending conferences she attends for "new lenses and new angles," while Teresa recounts the World Domination Summit — and the "one year from now" exercise that led her to pack up and move to Oregon. From there they get into why awe and being fully in the moment matter, drawing on kite surfing, mountain biking, hockey, and a Formula One track day, and why learning a new sport quietly teaches you to be a beginner again.

But the heart of the episode is a caution: comfort-zone-pushing experiences only work when leaders co-design them with their teams. Push too far, and you alienate people instead of growing them.

You've got twelve people and one hour booked at next week's offsite. Can someone teach your team to do continuous discovery in that hour? Teresa Torres's answer is a flat no — and this episode is about why.

Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack one of the most common requests they get during offsite-and-strategy season: "Can you teach my team continuous discovery in a single session?" Petra often gets requests like this: "We want our product people to take more ownership. Could you do a keynote at our all-hands that gets that going?" The problem, they argue, is a mismatch — people ask for a service (a talk, a workshop) expecting a benefit (a capable, habit-driven team) that the service simply can't deliver. They separate know-how from skill, explain why real capability is built in a "gym" of repeated practice rather than a one-hour download, and get honest about what a talk, a four-hour workshop, and a full coaching program can each realistically achieve.

If you're the one buying — or delivering — team training, this is a practical guide to calibrating expectations before anyone books the room.

We now record almost everything — every meeting has an AI note-taker, and some people wear glasses that capture every word. So what does that do to our relationships when nothing is forgotten and everything can be fact-checked?

Petra Wille and Teresa Torres explore the promise and the unease of a fully-transcribed world. Teresa shares how checking her own Granola transcripts revealed she'd been misremembering conversations — and getting frustrated with people over things she never actually said. Petra describes the strange feeling of a colleague pulling up a transcript to correct her recollection of her own past opinion. Together they get to the bigger question: should we hold people accountable to what they said weeks ago, or grant each other permission to evolve?

Is innovation the goal — or just a byproduct of solving customer problems well? In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack one of the most misused words in product: "innovation." Teresa makes the case that chasing novelty for its own sake pushes teams toward complex solutions that don't actually serve customers better, while Petra argues that simplicity and reduction can be their own kind of innovation.

Using the surprisingly rich history of the humble login — from passwords to single sign-on to Slack's magic links, 1Password, and passkeys — they explore why yesterday's breakthrough becomes today's friction, why novelty carries a hidden cognitive cost for users, and where the best innovation actually comes from (hint: it's often a cross-functional "just now possible" moment).

A must-listen for product managers who want to differentiate without over-engineering — and who'd rather be great at solving customer problems than "innovative" for its own sake.