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All Things Product with Teresa and Petra – Unfiltered, insightful, and straight to the point. Join Teresa Torres and Petra Wille as they dive into the world of product management—one topic at a time. No long interviews, no fluff—just real conversations about the challenges, trends, and ideas shaping the way we build products. Each week, we tackle a different topic in short, digestible episodes (15-30 minutes)—perfect for your morning commute or coffee break. 🎯 What to expect: 🔹 Curated randomness: We take turns picking topics, bringing fresh perspectives to each discussion. 🔹 Unscripted, authentic conversations: Personal experiences, opinions, and practical advice—without the corporate polish. 🔹 For product people, by product people: Whether you're a product manager or product leader, you’ll find insights you can actually use. Expect deep dives into product thinking, decision-making, leadership, experimentation, AI, and more—plus the occasional spicy take. 💡 Got a topic you’d love us to cover? Send it our way! 🎧 Listen to All Things Product on your favorite podcast platform and join the conversation.

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Check latest episodes from All Things Product with Teresa and Petra podcast

Mind-Bending Experiences

2026/10/20

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.

Training Expectations

2026/10/13

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.

Recorded Conversations

2026/10/06

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?

Unpacking Innovation

2026/09/29

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.

Trash Can Tracking

2026/09/22

What if the ideas you throw away tell you more about the health of your product process than the ones you ship? In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille introduces trash can tracking — a deceptively simple technique for making discovery work visible. By adding trash can symbols across your discovery and delivery boards, teams can see (and celebrate) the customer problems and solutions they deliberately choose not to pursue. Petra and Teresa dig into what an empty problem-space trash can versus an empty solution-space trash can each signals about your team's innovation, strategy, and discovery culture. Along the way they wrestle with the "golden trash can," the hidden cost of solving every customer problem that lands on your plate, and how psychological safety shapes which problems ever surface in the first place. Whether your trash cans are overflowing or suspiciously empty, this conversation will change how you think about the work you decide to walk away from.

Delivery Isn't Free

2026/09/15

Everyone's saying it: "Now that AI makes delivery free…" But is it? In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres pull apart one of the most repeated claims in product right now. They dig into why building a single feature has gotten dramatically cheaper — while building a real, production-quality product has not. Teresa breaks down what happens when teams treat coding agents as "free": spaghetti code, Frankenstein data models, feature bloat, and the maintenance nightmare waiting three weeks down the road. Along the way, they unpack the crucial difference between build to learn and build to earn, why the last 30% of a product is where the real work lives, and why AI products (not just AI-assisted code) are far harder to ship than the demos make them look. If you've been tempted by the "delivery is free, taste/discovery is all that matters" narrative, this conversation is your reality check. Delivery got cheaper. It did not get free — and it never will.

Facilitation Skills

2026/09/08

Conflict on a product team isn't a warning sign — the absence of it usually is. In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres tackle a question Teresa hears constantly: what should a product trio do when collaboration breaks down and disagreement turns into friction? Petra makes the case for something many teams quietly abandoned — the retrospective — and argues that facilitation is a genuine, learnable skill that product people should invest in, not outsource by default. Teresa introduces a framework from academic research on team dynamics: the distinction between task conflict (we disagree on how to do the work) and relationship conflict (something about how we work together puts us at odds). The two require completely different responses, and confusing them is where teams get stuck. Together they get practical about team charters, when to bring in a neutral third party, how to choose that person, joint escalations, and why running an experiment often beats arguing over opinions. If your trio is avoiding hard conversations — or having the same one on repeat — this one's for you.

Quality Of Evidence

2026/07/14

You've got behavioral analytics, support tickets, sales call notes, and a feedback inbox that never empties. With all that data coming in, do product teams actually still need to go out and talk to users? In this episode, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dig into why not all product evidence is created equal — and why the type of data you collect matters just as much as the volume. Teresa introduces her "ladder of evidence" framework and shares what she's learning from real interview transcripts through her work at Vistaly: that many teams are confusing product demos, stakeholder meetings, and opinion-gathering sessions for genuine customer research. They explore the spectrum from low-quality signals (support tickets, app store reviews) to rich, story-based interviews — and why the goal isn't perfection, but moving in the right direction. Plus: why even a mediocre interview is better than no interview at all, and how to coach teams toward stronger evidence without discouraging them from talking to customers in the first place.

Stepping Into Leadership

2026/07/07

Every product manager wants to move into leadership — but nobody wants to hire a leader without leadership experience. So how do you break the cycle? In this episode, Teresa and Petra unpack the practical, often-overlooked ways individual contributors can build real leadership skills right now, without waiting for a title change. Petra shares a surprisingly simple starting point: understand what your organization actually expects from its leaders, then begin deliberately practicing those behaviors in your current role. The conversation goes deep on two of the most foundational leadership skills — the art of saying no with evidence and clarity, and the ability to provide directional clarity at increasing time horizons. Whether you're setting direction for a sprint today or hoping to own product strategy someday, this episode gives you a clear path to get there.

AI-Shaped Problems

2026/06/30

Think you don't have big enough problems for AI to help with? Think again. In this episode, Petra and Teresa tackle one of the most common blockers people face when starting out with AI: not knowing where to begin. It's not a lack of problems — it's a lack of exposure. Teresa shares the daily habit that took her from feeling behind to using AI every single day, and why starting small (and terrible) is exactly the right approach. They also dig into the noise problem: why you don't need MCP servers, plugins, or the latest AI app to get real value, and how focusing on a specific task is the fastest path to learning what AI is actually good at. If you've been waiting for the "right" moment to start, this episode is your nudge. One of the most common things Petra hears from her coaching clients: "I don't have big enough problems to use AI for." Teresa's take? That's not the problem. The real blocker is that you don't know what AI is good at until you start using it — and you can't start using it well until you know what it's good at. In this episode, Petra and Teresa share how to break out of that loop.

Creating Experiences

2026/06/23

What makes an event truly unforgettable — and what can product teams learn from it? In this episode, Teresa sits down with Petra Wille to explore how Petra and her co-organizer Arne design experiences (not just events) at Product at Heart and their Product Leadership gatherings. From a candlelit speakers' dinner in a rosemary-covered greenhouse to a disco ball that appeared for exactly 20 seconds, Petra shares how intentional design, sensory details, and a little bit of goofy magic help attendees shed their corporate armor and open up to real inspiration and connection. Teresa draws the parallels back to product design — from designing for delight and awe, to the classic question of who you're choosing to serve. In this episode, Teresa and Petra explore the art of creating experiences — whether at a conference or in a product — and why the details that seem extravagant are often the ones that matter most.

Organizational Change Is Exhausting

2026/06/16

Organizational change is exhausting — so stop trying to force it. Petra and Teresa unpack why trying to fix the people and processes around you is almost always wasted energy, and what actually works instead. If you've ever wanted to champion a new way of working inside a resistant organization, this one's for you.

Learning Together

2026/06/09

What's the best way to invest in your team's professional development — train everyone at once, let people self-direct, or something in between? Petra Wille and Teresa Torres explore why the sweet spot might not be what most organizations default to. They share real examples from their work with product teams and leaders — from book clubs to group coaching — and make a case for small, intentional groups as a powerful (and underused) learning model.

Procurement

2026/06/02

Teresa is cranky — and honestly? She has every right to be. In this episode, Teresa and Petra go on a deeply relatable rant about the absurdity of modern corporate procurement processes. Teresa is simultaneously juggling seven speaking engagement contracts, and six of them have become a part-time job in themselves — think 80-page ethics policies, 800-question security forms, and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) questions asked 17 different times. Meanwhile, the one company that just put her fee on a credit card? Scheduled, confirmed, and done in two weeks. Petra chimes in with her own procurement horror story — filling out 12 identical Word document forms — and the two draw a bigger point from the chaos: broken vendor processes don't just frustrate consultants, they prevent organizations from getting the expertise they actually need. If you've ever wondered why that training got canceled, why that speaker backed out, or why your company can't seem to bring in outside experts — this episode might answer that question.

Is Technology Good?

2026/05/26

We built the internet. We championed social media. We're now building AI. But what if, looking back, we made things worse? In this candid and wide-ranging conversation, Teresa and Petra wrestle with a question that's hard to ask from inside tech: is the industry we've dedicated our careers to actually net positive for the world? From a chance comment by a non-tech family member to jarring observations about human isolation in San Francisco, this episode doesn't shy away from the discomfort. They explore the role of greed in how technology has evolved, what the "tech bro" narrative is costing us in human terms, the loneliness epidemic, and why speaking to people outside our industry echo chambers might be one of the most important things we can do. But they don't stop at critique — they also cast a genuinely hopeful vision for what responsible, community-centered technology could look like, including the idea of "mom and pop tech" that serves neighborhoods, not shareholders. If you work in tech and you've ever had a nagging feeling that something's gone wrong — this one is for you.