All Things Product with Teresa and Petra

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...

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...

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...

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...