All episodes

Is product management dead?

Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack the big question making the rounds at conferences: Is PM disappearing—or evolving?

Their take: product management isn’t dead. But the traditional product trio (PM, design, engineering) is collapsing into something new.

AI is raising the baseline. More of the repeatable 80% can now be built by anyone with the right tools. The future belongs to “product builders” — people with a shared foundation across disciplines and deep expertise in one area.

If you work in product, design, or engineering, this episode is your signal to start upskilling.

What happens when AI starts giving advice in your voice — advice you’d never actually give?

In this episode, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack the rise of AI “clones” built from podcast transcripts and public content. They explore where experimentation is exciting, where it crosses ethical lines, and what happens when mediocre AI outputs get attributed to real people.

They discuss IP, open-sourced transcripts, pirated books in LLMs, inference costs, and the uncomfortable question: if anyone can prompt “act like Teresa,” how do creators make a living?

This isn’t anti-AI. It’s a nuanced conversation about quality, consent, and remembering...

When the world feels like it’s spinning out, it can be hard to stay grounded—especially if you’re someone who cares deeply and pays attention. In this episode, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres talk about what it looks like to stay sane (and still be helpful) when everything feels “bonkers.”

They share practical ways to cope without checking out: living your values in small, daily decisions; choosing where you invest your attention, time, and platform; and building bridges instead of feeding polarization. Along the way, they explore the idea of “under-complexity” (how oversimplified narratives make anxiety worse), how to seek more...

In this episode of All Things Product, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille tackle one of the hardest decisions in product and business: when—and how—to kill your darlings.

They dig into the uncomfortable middle ground between obvious failure and runaway success: products that are profitable, loved by customers, but fundamentally flatlining. Teresa shares candid stories from her own business about sunsetting products that were bringing in real revenue, including a decision that cut 40% of her income—on purpose.

Together, Petra and Teresa explore why mediocre success can be more dangerous than failure, how team structure and org design make sunsetting harder,...

Ever feel like your product team is “lost in the woods”? Petra Wille and Teresa Torres borrow a set of “lost person” patterns (what people tend to do when they realize they’re lost) and map them to how teams behave when strategy gets fuzzy, outcomes drift, or constraints aren’t clear.

They unpack five common moves—freezing, chasing shortcuts, following the first visible path, relying too heavily on intuition, and retracing your steps—and translate them into practical actions: when to stop and escalate, how to pressure-test a “shortcut” strategy, how to make more paths visible, and how to use principles and discovery...

Where exactly is the boundary between product and engineering—and what happens when it gets blurry?

In this episode, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille dig into a tension many product teams quietly struggle with: product managers taking on responsibility for bugs, tech debt, and even system architecture. What starts as “being helpful” often turns into burnout for PMs and lower-quality outcomes for everyone.

They unpack why this pattern shows up so often, how legacy IT mindsets and the “CEO of the product” myth contribute to the problem, and what healthy product–engineering collaboration actually looks like in modern product teams.

If you’ve...

Product leaders are overwhelmed — and it’s not just you.

Between shrinking headcount, constant AI disruption, economic uncertainty, and nonstop context switching, many product leaders are trying to do more with less while still protecting their teams. In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack what real support for product leaders actually looks like.

They explore why product leaders often underinvest in themselves, how to think about delegation without guilt, and what kinds of support systems actually scale your impact — from executive assistants and research support to coaches and communities of practice. If you’re...

Petra finally carved out time to try Claude Code—and immediately ran into the “this tool thinks everything is a code repo” reality. In this episode, Petra and Teresa unpack what it’s like to move from Claude-in-the-browser to Claude on your machine, where it can actually work with your files, folders, and workflows.

They dig into practical setup choices (like using /init, Claude MD rules, and “walled garden” access), why task management becomes the surprising on-ramp for testing Claude Code, and how to use it for content retrieval across your own archives (blog posts, book drafts, transcripts, notes). Teresa also shares...

Is hiring broken—or just badly designed?

In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack what’s really going wrong in modern hiring processes. From AI-fueled application overload to endless interview loops and “casual” team lunches that derail months of work, they explore how groupthink, bias, and poorly defined criteria are quietly sabotaging good hiring decisions.

They discuss why involving too many people with veto power often leads to no decision at all, how “culture fit” becomes a proxy for bias, and what product teams can learn from product discovery when designing hiring processes. Plus, they share...

Build vs. buy is one of those product decisions that never goes away — and AI is changing how teams think about it (but maybe not in the way you expect).

In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack the build vs. buy conversation through real examples, personal stories, and practical decision-making frameworks. Teresa shares why she would never build her own blogging platform — but did build her own task management system — and what that reveals about core value, data ownership, and long-term maintenance.

Together, Petra and Teresa explore how AI, vibe coding,...