Imagine if every product team on earth suddenly stopped guessing. No more features built on vibes, no more roadmaps shaped by the loudest executive, no more three-month bets that turn into six-month rewrites.
Now imagine the opposite — the world we actually live in. Most teams still build like it’s 2007.
That tension sits at the heart of this conversation with Teresa Torres, the product discovery coach who’s spent the last 14+ years pushing teams toward a simple but uncomfortable idea: you’re wrong more often than you think… so learn faster.
Torres, author of the bestselling Continuous Discovery Habits and founder of Product Talk Academy, has coached thousands of PMs, designers, and engineers around the world. And in this episode, she opens a window into how great teams think — and why most companies still struggle to get there.
The Origin Story: “Wait… this isn’t how business works?”
Torres’ journey begins in college, where she first encountered human-centered design and made an innocent assumption: this is how companies make product decisions.
Reality arrived quickly.
Her early jobs at small startups were messy, improvisational, and allergic to customer conversations. She remembers roadmaps made of crowd-sourced ideas sorted by “flavor of the week,” PMs who never spoke to users, and founders who clung to their vision so tightly they missed what customers actually needed.
But this exposure to chaos shaped her worldview. It taught her:
Most teams default to execution, not learning.
Founders often confuse conviction with inflexibility.
Building products “right” requires a continuous mindset, not project-based thinking.
By her fourth startup, she saw the same dysfunction everywhere — and decided to dedicate herself to fixing it.
Why Product Teams Still Don’t Talk to Customers
Torres says there’s a simple human reason behind all this dysfunction: we think we’re right.
This isn’t arrogance — it’s cognitive wiring. Our brains generate fast answers, tidy stories, and confident opinions, even when the underlying reality is fuzzy. So PMs, engineers, and founders rely on intuition, assumptions, and secondhand inputs from sales or execs.
The result is predictable: teams build too much, learn too late, and double down on bad bets.
The antidote? Continuous interviewing. Not quarterly research. Not “let’s do 50 interviews before launch.” She means interviewing every week, no matter how busy you are.
Because customer conversations aren’t about “what do you think of my idea?” — they’re about understanding the customer’s mental model:
How they think
How they decide
How they behave
Why they choose one solution over another
Great products match those mental models precisely. Even small mismatches create friction, and friction kills adoption.
The Founder’s Paradox: Strong Vision, Flexible Path
Founders are wired for conviction. It’s part of the job description, seeing a future no one else sees and dragging it into existence through brute force.
But that strength quickly becomes a liability.
Torres argues that founders often:
Have strong views about the destination
But accidentally apply that stubbornness to the path
Which leads to over-specifying, micromanaging, and rejecting customer input that contradicts their vision
Her rule is elegant:
Be stubborn about the future. Be flexible about the details.
She uses Dropbox’s early days as an example: the founders kept the vision fixed (“your files everywhere”), but iterated relentlessly on how to deliver it. That flexibility made the vision real.
What Makes a Great Product Manager Today
Torres points to a trait that’s becoming something like the superpower of the next decade: agency — the belief that your actions shape the world around you.
In her words: great PMs…
Don’t wait for permission
Don’t blindly execute someone else’s plan
Don’t hide behind “my boss told me to”
Look for ways to move the team forward even when the org is messy
She pairs agency with its essential counterpart: curiosity. Even the best PMs start wrong; curiosity is how they course-correct.
AI and the Return of the Builder Spirit
One of the most compelling sections of the conversation is her comparison between today’s AI moment and the early web.
If you were building in the ’90s, she says, you remember the energy — the tinkering, the sense that everything was new, and the willingness to turn a toy into a business.
LLMs feel exactly like that era.
Except now:
The tools are more powerful.
The adoption curve is much faster.
The stakes are higher.
Torres believes AI is rekindling the fun, playful, exploratory energy that originally drew people into tech — before the “tech bro” era, before the politics, before the layoffs, before the homogenization of SaaS.
But she also flags real concerns: consolidation of power, environmental impacts of data centers, and the risk that foundational models become commoditized as open-source catches up.
The Hidden Reason Product Culture Fails
Product culture often falls on a simple domino pattern:
If the CEO doesn’t get product, nothing works.
If middle managers demand roadmaps and outputs, nothing works.
If teams can’t make decisions, discovery collapses.
Even famously “great” product companies have pockets of dysfunction. Torres argues that the real miracle isn’t that product cultures fail — it’s that any company manages to get it right at all.
But when it works, it works because:
Leadership values outcomes, not features
Teams have autonomy on the how
Everyone aligns on customer value and business value together
It sounds simple. It’s not.
The Birth of Product Talk Academy
After years as a startup PM, designer, and eventual CEO, Torres left the operating world burnt out. Consulting began as survival, then evolved into something far larger: a scalable way to teach teams continuous discovery.
A decade later, Product Talk Academy has trained over 18,000 students across 100+ countries.
Her latest wave of innovation? AI-powered deliberate practice — simulated customer interviews, automated feedback loops, and digital coaching environments that let PMs practice the craft the way musicians practice scales.
She’s also launching new content and tools built on Cloud Code and diving deep into how AI can accelerate skill development for product teams.
Where the Product Discipline Is Headed Next
Torres doesn’t pretend to predict the future — but she sees a few early signals:
Titles will matter less.
Builders will matter more.
AI fluency will become a fundamental PM skill.
The best teams will use AI to scale discovery, not shortcut it.
Roles will blur as tools make everyone more capable.
The product org of the future will look more fluid, more empowered, and more experimental.
If the early internet unlocked website builders, e-commerce founders, and indie hackers, AI is about to unlock something even bigger: anyone who’s curious enough to follow their ideas, prototype them instantly, and learn from customers in real time.
It’s a good time to be a builder again.
Final Thought
Listening to Teresa Torres is like getting a systems-level reboot of how product work should function. She blends discipline with humility, vision with flexibility, and a refreshingly realistic understanding of human nature.
Whether you’re a founder, PM, designer, or engineer, her message lands the same way:
Your ideas are probably wrong — but you can learn your way to something right.
And the faster you learn, the better your company becomes.
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Chapters:
00:01 Meet Teresa Torres
00:59 Origin Story
02:13 Early Startup Chaos
03:52 Continuous Customer Conversations
06:33 Scaling & Slowing Discovery
07:13 Founder Conviction vs. Flexibility
09:55 Scaling Product Beyond the Founder
11:21 Return to Command-and-Control
13:06 What Makes a Great PM
15:23 AI’s Impact on Product
18:19 Tech Losing Its Spark
21:39 Why Product Culture Fails
23:36 Lessons From Early Startups
26:47 Ingredients of Great Product Culture
29:39 Most Ideas Are Wrong
31:34 The Steve Jobs Misconception
32:10 Core Continuous Discovery Habits
34:18 Customer vs. Business Value
36:30 Better Customer Interviewing
39:20 Evaluating Founders on Discovery
41:30 Product Talk Academy Origin
45:01 Scaling Discovery With AI
48:45 Rebuilding With AI After Injury
51:00 The Future of PM Roles
52:20 Closing
Transcript:
Brian Bell (00:01): Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast today. We’re thrilled to have Teresa Torres on the mic. She is an internationally acclaimed author, product discovery coach and founder of Product Talk Academy, best known for her book, Continuous Discovery Habits, and for helping teams at companies like Spotify, Capital One, and others build discovery into their weekly rhythm. She teaches thousands of product people how to align business outcomes with real customer insights, test assumptions early, and make discovery a habit rather than a checkbox. Thanks for coming on.
Teresa Torres (00:29.): Thanks for having me.
Brian Bell (00:31): And I was telling you this before we started recording, but I’m a longtime fan. mean, I remember reading all of your product blogs, it must have been 15 years ago at this point, back in the early 2010s. it’s like meet your hero day here on the Ignite podcast.
Teresa Torres (00:45.): Thanks, it has been a long run, but I’m still having fun, so that’s all that counts, right?
Brian Bell (00:53): That’s amazing. Yeah. Well, I’d love to get your kind of your backstory. What’s your origin story?
Teresa Torres (00:59): You know, it’s sort of funny. I got introduced to human centered design as an undergrad in college and I naively thought that’s how business worked. And so I went into my first job thinking like, we’re gonna be talking to our customers and we’re gonna be testing our designs and everything’s gonna be great. And then I very quickly learned that’s not how business works at all. I worked at a number of really early stage startups early in my career and that was a really fortunate. I know a lot of people early in their career, they chase the big name logos and that’s valuable too. But I think what I really liked was I got to play a lot of hats early. I got sort of firsthand exposure to business early. And so I’ve always sort of blurred the boundaries between even front end engineering, design, product management. And it’s really influenced the way that I think about the world. And probably after, I think I worked at four different companies and after seeing the same pattern everywhere, I was like, okay, maybe I should just focus on trying to get product teams to talk to their customers a little more often. And so I think, let’s see, we’re in 2025, 14 years ago, I started working as a product discovery coach.
Brian Bell (02:13): And it was not too long after that, probably a year or two that I ran across your online musings, you know, cause I was, I was entering product around 2012 and it was very much like you said, you know, no one was talking to customers. You know, I worked at rocket fuel, which was a, uh, an ad tech unicorn and I got there and it was just complete waterfall. Yeah. Just, just complete waterfall. was like, and no, no product managers were talking to customers. And I used a lot of your teachings and others.
Teresa Torres (02:20): Yeah, nice.
Brian Bell (02:42): To say, no, let’s actually get out of the building and really talk to people and figure out what their pain points are. And it was just so surprising that it was very much in hindsight like a technical PM role. You just kind of take the requirements from the sales and product marketing teams and you just go build what they tell you to build.
Teresa Torres (03:01): Unfortunately, that’s still very common today. I mean, I remember being blown away when I worked at a startup where our roadmap was our VP of product literally just captured everybody’s product ideas. I mean, everybody’s product ideas into a spreadsheet. And then he just reorganized the rows based on the flavor of the week. And I remember just being blown away that like, really, this is your strategic decision making? Like, I don’t really get it. And so what’s good though, is I do think the product. The craft of building products, how we decide what to build, is evolving. We’ve made a ton of progress. It still feels glacially slow, but if we take the long arc, we have amazing tooling. We’ve made many, many more teams are talking to customers on a regular basis. We’re starting to test our ideas. So it is nice to see a little bit of evolution in the industry.
Brian Bell (03:52): How do you advise teams how often to talk to customers? Because a lot of times you go, you figure out the problem, and you’re like, OK, now we got to go execute on this. And it’s not going to be a two week sprint to do this thing. It’s going to be a quarter or two. What is the right cadence? it kind of depend on what you’re building and what the cycle time of what you’re entails? Or how do you kind of advise teams to think about that?
Teresa Torres (04:17): Dig in even to your comment about it’s not gonna take two weeks it’s gonna take a quarter. I think a lot of this happens because it’s so easy to think in big projects and that’s you know all of business works on it from a project mindset but I think that really the real power and product comes from embracing what’s often called a product mindset. I like to think about it more as a continuous mindset. It’s this idea that like our product is never done. There’s never gonna be with a project there’s an ending. We complete the project we’re done. With product, especially digital products, it’s always evolving. We’re never, ever done. And so if we instead adopt this continuous mindset, what we have to do is we have to learn how to take these big, giant monolithic projects and start to think about them more continuously. So how do we break that work up into bite-sized chunks? And of course, we’ve always been doing this, Engineers work in bite-sized chunks. The difference with a continuous mindset is we’re working in bite-sized chunks where each chunk is valuable to the customer. And that’s the hard part, right? So it’s easy to say, like, it’s going to take it three months to build this thing, and at the end of the three months, we’ll deliver this really valuable thing to our customer. It’s a whole other thing to say, OK, well, let’s take this three months at work and think about how do we carve it up in a way that each little piece creates some value to customers.And the benefit of this is it means that we don’t have to wait till the end of three months to create some value for customers. They’re getting value all along. And so I think to learn how to do that really well, we actually have to be talking to our customers continuously. We have to understand, instead of thinking about it as like a big three month project, we’re kind of thinking about it as like, let’s say it’s 10 nine day projects oreven better 24 and a half day projects. I know there’s weekends in there. I’m just try ng to make my math easy in my brain. So maybe it’s 23 day projects. And then I think that if we think about it as we always want to get feedback from customers on our projects, well now we have teeny tiny projects, so we need to get continuous feedback. And that also is what helps to make sure each chunk is actually providing some value to customers.
Brian Bell (06:33): Yeah, I love that. How do you advise, you know, this is very much a startup podcast, you know, we invest in early stage startups, know, precedence seed, you know, which are basically founder led product teams, right? You know, it’s the founder, sometimes just a business co founder and technical co founder. As you’re handing off the reins, it seems to me as the organization grows in complexity, it slows it down, right? It slows this continuous discovery process down. How do you advise, you know, founding teams that are starting to grow the product and engineering and design orgs to kind of maintain what they had when it was just, you know, a two pizza team as Amazon would say.
Teresa Torres (07:13): Yeah, I think what’s hard about startups, and this is where all of my full-time employee experience was, is like a startup founder is a unicorn in and of themselves, right? Like they’re crazy enough to think that their vision in their head is the right thing, is the right view of the future, and they’re willing to bet a lot of their own, oftentimes money, definitely sweat equity into making that vision come into like the near future, like now. And that’s amazing and I feel like good founders have a ton of conviction and that’s a big part of their strengths The challenges our strengths are often our weaknesses and when it comes to discovery that strength of like I have this really strong view of the future and I’m willing to bet everything to go after it makes it really hard for you to see How the how you’re gonna get there might be wrong And so I encourage founders to like have a strong conviction about the future but be really flexible in how you’re going to get there. this is where discovery, you might, and actually let’s think of a really famous example of this. Dropbox released their launch video where it was just this picture, this vision of you have access to your files everywhere. And that sounds so silly now because we’ve all had access to our files from everywhere for so long, but when it came out, it was revolutionary. And I remember before that, I grew up in the Napster generation. I kind of, already had this idea of peer to peer and files everywhere, but it was hard, right? Like, and it wasn’t, we weren’t quite sure if it was safe, let alone legal. And Dropbox comes along and they look like this, like, they’re gonna build this thing that is clearly legal, clearly safe, and you can still have all those benefits. And I think it just really resonated. Now, Dropbox had to make a million decisions along the way to make that feature come into reality. And if... The founders of Dropbox had been really stubborn in all of those decisions. They probably wouldn’t have been successful, right? To get to a successful product, we have to be really flexible in the how, and we probably have to try 400 different ways to get there on a million different decisions. And I think what’s hard about for startup founders is that sometimes that conviction we have about the future, we misapply to the how. And then we build the wrong product because we’re stubborn about our view of how it should work.
Teresa Torres (09:34): Instead of our customer’s view of how they need it to work. And so I think the first thing is we have to get through that like awkward, how do we separate our conviction. Conviction is good, so we talk about founder mode, but micromanaging in the how can be really problematic. Let me just pause there and then I can continue.
Brian Bell (09:53): No, that’s great.
Teresa Torres (09:55): Okay, I think maybe what was behind your original question was this idea of like, eventually a startup is gonna outgrow the founder being the product manager. And how do we like scale ourselves and how do we make sure that good decisions keep happening? I think again, it’s really important not to confuse those things. Strong conviction about the view of the future while being flexible on the details. And I think we have to really communicate to our teams what is non-negotiable about that future vision and then be let go of literally everything else. Now that doesn’t mean we can’t hold our teams to like a high standard of quality from a craft standpoint and from a design standpoint and from like a taste is the word of the day lately, right? Like I do think that it is a founder’s job to maintain that standard of quality. But I think it like the way that we scale ourselves in a startup or not.
Teresa Torres (10:54): Is that we’re really clear about the non-negotiables, that view of the future, and we’re really flexible on everything else. Because we’re going to get the best work out of our teams if we empower them, if we give them a lot of space to go and explore. And you know what’s funny is right now we’re going through this period where the industry is swinging back a little bit. There’s this push to move back to command and control. I mean, there was even some of that in that Founder Mode essay by Paul Graham. And like,
Teresa Torres (11:21): Brian Chesky is even going this way a little bit. Maybe not as much as people think The Spotify guy is definitely going back in this direction and I think
Brian Bell (11:30): That’s interesting because Spotify, historically, was very agile. They had distributed teams, they all made their own decisions about their kind of part of the stack, and they had this beautiful org structure that enabled the decision making to be pushed down to the team level.
Teresa Torres (11:44): Everything’s easy in a zero interest rate environment, right? Like, this cash is flowing, we can give everybody all the empowerment they want and then things get scary and our human nature is to tighten up. But I think, again, this distinction between conviction about the future vision versus conviction about the details is a good distinction. Because I think in lean economic times, it’s actually, you should be doubling down on that vision and you should be even more flexible. On the details because the details are going to change. Like it is impossible for any human or even any set of humans to get it right 100 % the first time. So like we have to have flexibility on the details. But I also think like the stronger your vision, the more likely you’re gonna find the right details. So I do think we are making some mistakes right now. Like we are overreacting a little bit. Which is fair, like the world is in a state right now where we should all overreact a little bit. But I would love to see this stronger distinction between founder mode should be about the vision, the future vision of the product and the quality of standard, the craft. And I think we can still give our product teams the flexibility on that.
Brian Bell (13:03): How do you make a good PM?
Teresa Torres (13:06): That’s a hard question. You know, there’s one word that comes to mind. It used to be curiosity, and I actually think curiosity is the root of the second word, but the term that people are throwing around a lot, which I think is really important, especially in the LLM world, is agency. And I think that like, agency is a word we use a lot. I’m not sure everybody understands what it means, but I think Steve Jobs really captured agency in his quote about, I’m gonna butcher the quote, but something along the lines of like,
Teresa Torres (13:35): Everything that you see in the world was created by a person and you could be that person, right? Like agency is this idea of like, we do impact our future and we do impact the world around us. And the more that we internalize that and believe that, the like more we’re able to do. And so I think for product managers, the reason why this is so critical is it’s so easy to think like, well, my boss isn’t asking me for this. They’re asking me for this other thing. So I’m just gonna do what I’m told.
Brian Bell (13:40) Love that.
Teresa Torres (14:03): Well, no, like if you have conviction about this other thing and you think what you’re being told is wrong, you need to like communicate that. And again, not stubbornly, right? Like I think one of the hardest things to balance is like we should have conviction and we should be really flexible. So how do we balance both of those things? I will share, I didn’t always get it right in my career. I definitely learned to like, should either be a founder or I should run my own business because I have a lot of conviction and I didn’t always have a lot of flexibility when I disagreed. With the founders that I worked with that also had a lot of conviction. And I think that’s an important thing to recognize. But I think all of us, even those of us that don’t want to be a founder and we’re going to be individual contributors for a lot of our career, this balance of conviction plus flexibility, I think, is really powerful. So I think a good product manager has high agency. They just find ways to get things done. One of the things I talk about is when you want to look at change, it starts with yourself. So it’s easy to complain about how your organization works, but literally change starts with you. So how do you look at what’s in your span of control, what you’re contributing to the system that’s at play? And then I think related to agency is curiosity. So I think it takes a lot of curiosity to start to envision what the world could look like rather than how it works today.
Brian Bell (15:23): You’ve seen a lot over your career and I’d love to get your thoughts on how AI, large language models specifically are changing product, if at all, because you’re on the ground. I haven’t been a PM since LLMS really came out a few years ago. What are you kind of seeing on the ground in product organizations.
Teresa Torres (15:43): So I’m gonna take this all the way back to the 90s. Like I started my career in, like I was in college in the mid 90s. I think I built my first internet product in, okay. Okay, I built my first internet product in the fall of 96. I actually built an Amazon site scraper that then led to me being one of their very first Amazon affiliates, which was super fun. Anyway.
Brian Bell (15:51): I think we’re about the same age, yeah. Like I started college late 90s, Yep.
Teresa Torres (16:10): At the time, so like I was a freshman in college in 95, 96, and I remember we all, I was at Stanford, they had computer clusters, like not everybody had their own computer. We were the first year that like everybody checked email, and so we would bring down the mail servers, like right after lunch, there was like these points in the day where everybody would try to read their email at the same time. All this is gonna sound crazy to folks younger than us, but there was a time when even email was new. And we were all learning how to build webpages for the first time. And I remember we like tracked like when HTML 3.2 came out and then when HTML 4 came out, like I remember when tables were new and then frames were new. And like this was super exciting because every release we were very curious. We were like, well, what else can we do with this? And it felt like a toy. Like in those first few months, it felt like a toy, but a lot of us very quickly turned them into businesses. Like I paid for college by building websites for businesses. And I ran a web hosting company where I basically paid to host to get a dedicated server and then I resold it as virtual hosting. And so what felt like a toy quickly turned into a business, and the reason why I’m going into this in way too much detail is LLMs feel like exactly the same thing. It feels like that exact same vibe of everybody is playing with this as a toy, we’re still trying to figure out. What does this do? What can we build? Everybody gets excited about every single release. Like Anthropic put something out and people go nuts. OpenAI had their dev day and everybody followed it like the old Mac developer days, right? Like there’s all this hype and excitement around it, but a lot of it still feels like a toy. But some of us are starting to push into what can we really do with this? And I feel like that... That is so fun. Like I know so many people and I put myself in this category too. We’re just reconnecting with what it means to be a builder because it’s just fun again. And I think software.
Brian Bell (18:11) It kind of, yeah, SAS was feeling pretty stale in the late 2010s. It was just like getting really developed and not a lot was changing. Yeah.
Teresa Torres (18:19): Tech got a little yucky. I mean, we’ve seen it a lot, right? Like all companies are following the same patterns, the political side of tech and like, especially on the national politics scene is just weird. I don’t care what your politics are, what’s going on is just weird. All the layoffs and layoffs when companies are doing really well, like that’s just insane to me. And so I feel like for those of us that have worked in tech for a long time, like it’s not what drew us to this, right? Like what drew us to tech was, this vision of the future of like what tech could enable and what tech could change. And I think we lost that. Like I think there was so much money in tech that it started to bring in the folks that were just in it for the money and not the idealists and the innovators. I mean, I’m starting to think of that cheesy Apple ad, but like it resonated with us for a reason. Yeah, yeah.
Brian Bell (19:05): The rise of the tech bro basically. Yeah. You know, instead of going to Wall Street, I went to Silicon Valley. I can make a bunch of money. Yeah. Yeah.
Teresa Torres (19:110: I mean, I get it. Like, I made a good living and having money is very comfortable and it can be life-changing and everybody should have that. Like, I’m not saying making a good living isn’t a worthwhile thing, but it shouldn’t be your primary driver. Like, and especially after you have enough, it definitely shouldn’t be your primary driver. And I feel like those early days, this is why I equate it back to the 90s, like those early days of the internet were so fun. And I think LLMs and generative AI is bringing that back. I think it’s reawakening a lot of makers. It’s also that there’s still that greed part. I go to LinkedIn and I cannot believe how much snake oil there is. There’s so much very surface level people writing about AI, they’re experts. I’m like, I always wanna repost. I’m not this much of a jerk, but I really wanna repost and just put a comment of how do you tell me that you’ve never used AI without using. Without telling me you’ve never used AI. It’s like, this is not real. Like you don’t just come on. It drives me nuts. But I think what’s coming with it is it is reawakening a lot of people for why they got into tech in the first place. And I don’t want to be all Pollyanna ish either because I actually have some huge concerns about the amount of power that’s being consolidated in a number of small companies. I have some huge concerns about like the crazy investment in data centers and like the impact on the environment. But we also had those concerns, maybe not those exact concerns, but the internet didn’t grow up without its own share of concerns. But I just think it’s super fun to be riding this next wave. And I feel really fortunate that I get to experience this big of a shift in technology more than once in my life. And people equate it to mobile, I call it baloney. Mobile was a shift, but it wasn’t a huge shift.
Brian Bell (21:05): Yeah, it was more like a new interface, but it wasn’t a big platform shift. Maybe cloud a little bit. think cloud change startups probably the most in tech, besides the internet and AI, I’d say.
Teresa Torres (21:18): But I think in terms of impact on the average human, AI feels more like the internet than mobile or even cloud. Cloud on business, I agree with you entirely. But if I’m thinking about my neighbor across the street who’s an optometrist, I think AI is going to impact him as much as the internet did. Whereas he’s got a phone, does he care?
Brian Bell (21:39): So looking back at some of your formative moments, are there any stories that kind of shape how you see good product management, good product discovery?
Teresa Torres (21:54): You know, it’s funny, I learned a lot by what not to do. I can’t say that I ever worked at a company where from the top down it was a good product culture. In fact, a lot of my career was advocating for good product culture. A lot of this is because I worked at early stage startups. And I think it’s really hard for founders to create a good product culture. I also probably didn’t work at some of the best companies, you know, and some people...
Brian Bell (22:22): Yeah, like the Intuits of the world were really famous for a good product culture, stuff like that.
Teresa Torres (22:23):And actually some people criticize me for that. They’re like, how does she know anything about products? She works at all these terrible companies. Well, you know, first of all, I don’t feel a need to defend myself. But second of all, I’ll say that you can learn a lot by learning what not to do. what was...
Brian Bell (22:41): You and me both. mean, most of my product experience is at early stage startups. And when I say early, I’m like, you know, is that like series A? You know, I think my first my first product role is at a series A company. And then, wow, that’s the Wild West of product. They just I was second product hire. The guy before me was hired a month or two before me. You know, they got a guy managing us has never done product before.
Teresa Torres (22:54): It is the Wild West. I was, I think, in my first company, I was the 50th employee. In my second, I was the 10th employee. In my third, I was the 23rd employee. And in my fourth, I can’t quite remember, but we were around 20 people. And I think people grossly underestimate how many startups fail. Like it’s not that I picked crappy companies, it’s I picked high-risk companies, right? And most high-risk companies fail. And also not all of those companies failed, but that’s a different story.
Brian Bell (23:19): Yeah, these are early. Yeah.
Teresa Torres (23:36): And the thing is like I could have worked at Google like I actually got a job offer from Google at one point I had plenty of friends that worked there in the late 90s like when they were less than 50 people I played roller hockey there One of my really best friend like closest friends at the time was the sixth employee at LinkedIn like I had plenty of opportunity to go work at these places The thing is that’s hindsight bias like at those times, I had very good reasons not to work at those places. I was a designer, and Google was very adamant that search is just 10 links on a page. It was the least interesting thing from a design standpoint. Yeah, now I was wrong, because I got into all kinds of stuff, but at the time, it was a good decision. So I can’t fret about that. I think, here’s the thing, and especially now that I’ve worked with a ton of companies, including some very successful companies.
Brian Bell (24:14): Speed is the design feature, right?
Teresa Torres (24:30): We see this same dysfunction literally everywhere. So like you mentioned Spotify, they’re known really well for the Spotify model and agile teams and cross-functional squads. And there are pockets of Spotify that do that extremely well. And there are pockets of Spotify that really struggle with that. Just like at Google, they’re known for OKRs. And there are pockets of Google that are amazing OKRs and outcome focused. And there are pockets of Google that are very output driven, engineering driven. No understanding of the business context, right? Like, it’s, we don’t have good companies and bad companies. That’s not, that’s like, that’s, there’s too much luck and uncertainty in the business world to be like, you’re amazing and you’re terrible. We have successful companies and we have companies that struggle to succeed. We have companies that survive and get by. And then we of course have companies that fail. And I think like what leads to a good product culture?So many things have to be in place that you have to have a CEO. And this is the thing that is most often missing. You have to have a CEO who gets it. And not just like, I read Marty Kagan’s book and I want to have a good product culture, but like has felt the pain of not having a good product culture and has learned we’re a product company first because any digital company is a product company first. And like is willing to prioritize that and invest in that. And I think historically, our CEOs have come from sales and come from market. Like they’re not coming from product. That thankfully has changed. But like historically, that’s not where they came from. It’s not what they cared about. And so it was really hard to get these companies that would be good product companies. But we’re seeing in the last 10 years, like the stripes of the world, Figma, we’re talking about founders that have product mindsets. And I think that started, so it’s starting to change, but it does start at the very top, like with the CEO, do they care about a product culture and is that what they’re prioritizing? And then I think the harder part, like if that’s in place, what’s really hard is all your middle managers have to also be bought in. So we tend to think about it as like we gotta train our teams that you need to learn some new skills. Yes, that is true.
Teresa Torres (26:47): But if you train your teams and they learn some new skills and all your middle managers are still asking for 12 month roadmaps and telling them what to build, nothing is going to change. And so it’s actually really hard to build a good product culture unless you’re a product-minded founder and you grow your company to be a good product culture. And literally every hire is coming in with a product mindset, which is why we see companies like Stripe. And it’s funny that I mentioned Stripe because they didn’t have product managers for a long, time, but they had product-minded employees across the board. And so thankfully, the internet has been around long enough that we are starting to see this. We’re starting to see product-native companies, which is very exciting. But I think it’s extremely hard for a non-product-native company to make that jump.
Brian Bell (27:34): It kind of reminds me of the good product manager, bad product manager. I think it was Ben Horowitz. He wrote that, right? So maybe we could, on the fly, brainstorm good product culture, bad product culture.
Teresa Torres (27:49): I think at the root of all of this, of why it’s so hard, is like for all humans, all of us, 100 % of us, like zero exceptions, it’s so easy in our heads to feel like we’re right. Right? Like we’re right. I have this idea, it’s based on my experience, I have a lot of conviction. Yeah.
Brian Bell (28:04) That we rationalize. We make a decision and then we try to rationalize like our what we’ve already made up our mind about.
Teresa Torres (28:10): So what’s hard, and thankfully the internet makes it possible to see this, we’re actually wrong more often than we’re right. Even at the best companies, the best product-minded founders are wrong more often than they’re right. And the really good ones admit it, they talk about like 80 % of our tests fail, right? Like we are, like full stop, we are.
Brian Bell (28:30): I think 80 % of the products I ever built, like hardly anybody used and generated no revenue. Like easily. I remember spending months on, on the, this is going to be, this is going to change the company. And then you release it and like just dead, you know, nobody used it.
Teresa Torres (28:41): So like we have to acknowledge that as part of the process. Like we are fundamentally gonna be wrong more often than we’re right. So then I think the key to a good product culture is how do we learn we’re wrong as early as possible so we don’t over invest in the wrong idea. And so that’s where like, you know, the earliest like widespread adoption of what some people call discovery, I don’t call this discovery, was the adoption of like large scale A-B tests. And I think I’m not poo-pooing A-B tests. I think they’re an amazing tool for measurement. Did what we build have the impact we expected it to have? They’re a terrible tool for should we build this? Because you have to do all the work before you can even get an answer to that question. Whereas with discovery, I like to avoid building the wrong things. Like that’s my goal with discovery is how do I learn as early as possible that my idea sucks? And if we assume most of our ideas are bad, now how do we do as little work as possible?
Brian Bell (29:12): Step in the right direction.
Teresa Torres (29:39.171): To learn whether we should invest in this or not. So that’s sort of my framing of discovery. And even that, like we could just stop here because that’s what’s hard about product culture. It’s really hard for humans to adopt this mindset of I’m probably wrong. And that we see that up and down the organization. And all it takes is one person in that like organizational hierarchy to have the view of I’m right, let’s just build this and it all falls apart. So I actually think...It’s a little miracle when we get companies with good product cultures, because it’s just really hard.
Brian Bell (30:08): And you know, it’s it’s there’s this mythology around Steve Jobs, right, as like kind of the best product manager ever. And he, you know, he had a vision and he was willing his vision into the world. But really, he was doing a lot of customer discovery, constant focus groups and constantly interviewing customers and asking them and showing them like prototypes and iterating.
Teresa Torres (30:35): I really like Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Isaacson is clearly obsessed with this idea of like the human that has an outsized impact on the world. And I love his biographies because of it. But he doesn’t fall prey to the like single hero myth. I mean, he does a little bit, like that’s how he picks his people, but he shows the whole person and their warts and all. And you know, Steve Jobs was not like he was a terrible manager for his first round at Apple. Yeah, so bad he got fired. And he’s criticized a lot for those early days of like Apple would not have existed without Wozniak. And a lot of like the like hardcore engineering nerds are like, what did Jobs do? That’s not fair. Jobs was a very, very good salesperson from day one. But he clearly learned a lot in his next in Pixar years. And when he came back to Apple, he was clearly a much better manager. But we also know he still wasn’t perfect.
Brian Bell (31:06): So bad he got fired.
Teresa Torres (31:34): And if we talk about like founder mode, I’m sure there’s plenty of details that he micromanaged. I mean, that’s kind of what he’s known for. But what, yeah, but he was exceptionally good at the two things we talked about. He was exceptionally good about being stubborn about his view for the future. And he was exceptionally good at holding a high standard of quality. Now he may not have always been great at being flexible on the how, but it turns out no human is perfect.
Brian Bell (31:40): Firing people on the elevator and things like that. Yeah.
Brian Bell (32:02): That’s amazing. So walk us through the core habits and continuous discovery habits. What are the hardest to make practical for teams?
Teresa Torres (32:10): Yeah, so the first is starting with an outcome. This is not a new idea. mean, Stephen Covey wrote in the seven habits of highly affected people, begin with the end in mind. That’s all this is, right? Because of the popu-
Brian Bell (32:21):What’s the outcome you’re looking for? What’s the business impact? Whatever it is. Yeah, the metric.
Teresa Torres (32:25): It’s this simple. What does success look like? What are we trying to do? And for a long time, product teams defined success as we built this thing. And so with outcomes, what we’re trying to do is shift from just saying we built this thing, which is the output, to getting more into, okay, we have this thing. What impact did that have on the customer and what impact did it have on the business? So one, like the tagline in my book is how do you discover products that create business value and customer value. And I would argue it’s not that hard to do one or the other. And neither is sustainable if you only do one of the two. What’s hard is how do we do both? And so the first step is we have to get really clear on what a success look like. And this is, I always define the outcome as success for the business. And this really ruffles my UX folks feathers because they think we should start with the customer. I have a reason for this. Customers have infinite needs. Like infinite needs. We could spend the rest of our lives satisfying customer needs and we would never be done. And so when we start with the business need, it acts as a filter on the customer needs on that realm. so we’re still customer focused. We’re still making sure we’re building for our customer and creating value for them. But we’re using the business need as a filter so we don’t waste our time building the wrong stuff. And actually, going to pick on Google because Google is really great at creating a ton of customer value and doesn’t always create business value, which is why Google has a graveyard of very popular products that were then killed. Right? yeah, mean, Google Reader is the one, right? Like, it’s devastating for those of us that used it regularly. And not only did that product not, for people aren’t familiar, Google Reader was an RSS reader. If you don’t even know what RSS is, like, just go...
Brian Bell (34:01): Google reader. I couldn’t believe it when they cancel that. I use that every day.
Brian Bell (34:08): I love that. I love that product.
Brian Bell (34:18): It was a, it was a feed of blogs basically. Yeah.
Teresa Torres (34:18): Learn some internet history. I mean, I still use an RSS reader. Anyway, it created a ton of customer value. It was free. It created almost no business value. And not only did it not create business value, it actually competed with the business value Google needed to create, which was Google doesn’t want you to have a feed of all your blogs where you don’t have to go to Google and search for them. Advertising in that product was always challenging. RSS is just technical enough, it was never gonna cross over to hundreds of millions of people, right? Like can see why they killed the product. But what I would argue is like why from a product culture did they not start with, okay, this is a cool idea and it’s somebody’s 20 % hobby project in the company, but like how did it get so big before they realized this is not a good product for our business? So that’s I think where the outcome comes in mind. And it’s funny that I used a Google example, cause they’re like, okay, our advocates right now, but whatever. Then I think the next one is, I think about this as like, we have to learn about our customers so that we can build the right things for them. And actually, I forget which Stripe founder said this, but I absolutely loved it. He tweeted something like, when we’re interviewing our customers, our goal is not to learn about our solution, it’s to learn about their mental model so that our product matches their mental model. And remember when I read that, I was like, that is a founder that 100 % gets it. So many product teams, when they interview customers, they walk in with a prototype and say, what do you think? And I think we’re missing the point of interviewing. When I interview you, my goal is to learn how you think, what you’re trying to do, what your goals are, the environment in which you’re trying to achieve those goals, how you think about achieving those goals, so that when I build a product for you, it matches your mental model exactly. Because even a little bit of deviation, means there’s going to be friction and you’re not going to use my product. So that’s the second. Yeah, so the second half is just interviewing. And I like to see teams interview every week. Just continuously invest in your understanding of a customer, what their mental model is, making sure what you’re building matches exactly how they think.
Brian Bell (36:30): What are some key questions for the founders listening out there that are like, okay, I’m talking to customers, am I doing it the right way? What should I be asking them?
Teresa Torres (36:39): So it kind of depends on the stage you’re at. So one of the things that I teach that’s in the book is what’s called story-based interviewing. So it’s this idea of collect a story about past behavior. So if I work at Netflix, don’t like my intuition is to ask, what do you like? What do you like to watch? How do you decide what to watch? Who do you watch with? What device do you watch on? The challenge with these questions is humans, again, 100 % of us. Are really bad at answering direct questions out of context. And by bad at answering questions, I don’t mean you won’t be able to answer the question. Your brain will give you a fast answer, but the answer your brain gives you won’t necessarily reflect what you actually do. So you might say, well, I like action movies. I typically watch with my partner. I watch in my living room. What you’re forgetting is like, yeah, but you also watch Ted Lasso, and you watch the documentary, and you watch the whatever. And sometimes you watch in bed on your phone. But you don’t want to tell me that because you find it embarrassing, right? Like, our brain takes these fast shortcuts. We know them as cognitive biases, and they interfere with our ability to give a reliable response. And the way that we’re going to overcome that is we’re going to keep the person grounded in actual behavior. So I’m not going to ask you what you like about Netflix. That’s a purely speculative question. Your brain is going to give you an unreliable answer. I’m going to ask you to tell me about the last time you watched Netflix. And then I can customize this. If I’m on the search team, I can say, tell me about the last time you defined something to watch. If I’m on the mobile team, I can say, tell me about the last time you streaming entertainment on the go. But I’m still asking for a specific story. And then my job as the interviewer is to keep the participant grounded in that story. And that’s great if you have a product or you have a product realm or you have a theory of your product. What’s hard for founders, like if your pre-product. A lot of your research should be at the business model canvas level and understanding customer segments and understanding value propositions. That can be a little bit different. You might do a little bit broader, more exploratory interviews, but I’d still try to keep it really grounded in real behavior. So I might do something like, tell me about your full day, tell me about the last week. So it might be a much broader scope, but it’s still grounded in actual behavior.
Brian Bell (39:02): So let’s take this from the VC angle, right? So I’m evaluating founders all the time. Put your, you know, your, I don’t know, your LP hat on now. And how should VCs be assessing founders ability to do customer discovery?
Teresa Torres (39:20): I mean, if you want to have deals, don’t know that this should be high on your list. Most people are bad at discovery. I wish I could say it was different. I my book has been out for four years now, over four years. People long before me have been writing about this. These are not new ideas. They’re fairly old ideas. But.
Brian Bell (39:42): Starting probably with like Steve Blank, Four Steps, to Epiphany, and yeah.
Teresa Torres (39:45): Even way before that, Like lot of this work is really grounded in even in like human factors from like physical products like that dates back to like the 50s and the 60s. So like this isn’t, these aren’t new ideas. Again, what’s hard is that we feel right in our head. And like if you’re investing, like especially if you’re doing like seed investing and even series A investing like. I would argue the most important thing is how much conviction does this person have and are they going to run through walls to make this happen? Right? Like that’s the most important thing. Like I don’t know that I would look for that flexibility we talked about in that early stage, which is hard because, I mean, you tell me, I would guess more startups fail because the founders don’t have enough conviction.
Brian Bell (40:35): That’s probably the number one reason. Yeah. Either one or both. They’re all co-founders decide to quit. Yeah.
Teresa Torres (40:41): Like in my ideal world, like my little idealist view, we would look for founders that had that conviction and had really good discovery habits. But like, I don’t know that that human exists. Now, if I’m a series B investor, series C investor, and we’re talking about companies that are starting to scale and they’re turning into real businesses, I absolutely want to be looking at like, okay, you founder may not have this skill. Have you brought in ahead a product that has this skill? So I think it really varies by stage. I mean, I know so many early, early stage investors talk about you’re making a bet on the team. And I think that’s true. Like the product, even what the company does might change 17 times. But I think the question is, is will they run through walls is way more important.
Brian Bell (41:26) :Why are they going to run through walls? That’s the interesting part is trying to figure out why. Let’s talk about Product Talk Academy. What is that? How did it start? How has it evolved? And what are you kind of learning by running that community?
Teresa Torres (41:43): So when I went out on my own, started like almost everybody did. I just started as a consultant. And one of the things, I actually didn’t make a conscious choice to go out on my own. I had been a startup CEO. I was not the founder. That’s a weird situation. I don’t always recommend that. I became the CEO in the 08 recession. We sold recruiting software. I don’t recommend any of this path. It was really hard, like extraordinarily hard. And I ended up leaving that job. Right around the time where we closed an asset sale. So that company kind of got bought as asset sale. And I left and I was really burnt out. And me leaving was even political. I had some ethical disagreements with my board. So I actually left about six weeks before the sale closed. And it was just yucky. And I was not ready to get a new job. But I also was not financially independent, so I needed some income. And I had a board member. I’m pretty sure this is how it played out. I had a board member that.
Teresa Torres (42:40): I had my back because I resigned on a Friday and on Monday I started getting phone calls about jobs. And I was not a somebody at that point, right? Like nobody had heard of me. I’d worked at four startups you’ve never heard of. Like it was just, I remember waking up on that Monday and getting those phone calls and being like, this is how Silicon Valley works. Okay, somebody is helping me out here. I get it. And so I started taking phone calls and I actually just was so burnt out. I had this like pit in my stomach of I can’t, I can’t go do this again. And I bet didn’t know what the answer was. And so what I did was when companies started calling me, I asked them, said, can I just do some research projects for you? And I actually started doing like user research as a consultant. And I didn’t love it because I really believe that product is continuous. And I was like, I’m just handing you some research and walking away and you’re no better off as an organization. And so I slowly started asking those companies, like, I will do this research for you. But you need to send your product teams along with me so that I can teach them how to do this. So that at the end of this engagement, your teams can do it on their own. And that’s what led to my coaching practice. And so for probably about 10 years, no, not even that long, probably for six or seven years, I coached teams. And I started by coaching product managers. By the way, they were not product coaches at the time. I know now there’s like 1,000 of them, I think 7,000 of them. I’m positive. Like I searched for product coach on LinkedIn and there were zero when I started and I wanted that framing. I was like really into this like create your own category. I wanted that framing because I didn’t want to do the work for companies. I wanted to enable companies to do the work themselves. I mean there were coaches. So like coaching was a thing, but not at the product team level. And so I started by coaching product managers. Some of my earliest companies I just found through like personal connections. Frankly, I got pretty lucky.
Teresa Torres (45:01): And then I realized, like, it’s not enough because a lot of the challenges product managers were having was with their cross-functional peers. So then I moved into team coaching. I did extremely well as a product team coach. A lot of that is because I met Marty Kagan pretty early on. I get a ton of referral business from SVPG. I’m eternally grateful to Marty for that. But I also started to see, like, I got to the point where, like, I had a six-month waiting list, a year waiting list. And I was like, okay, this is great for me personally, but it’s not the best way to scale my impact. And so I started to think about like, how do I make this more scalable? And because I’m a product person, I just started to think about it from a product mindset. And I started to experiment with online courses. It took a long time to get online courses right, because it’s very different to have someone on a phone call who can help you versus having a curriculum that you kind of have to go through. And there’s a teacher, but you’re not in the context of your own work. And so through the Product Talk Academy, we have trained thousands of people. think we’re almost, I think we are over 18,000 students now. We’ve worked with people from over 100 countries, over 3000 companies. Like it’s just, it’s mind boggling. And what’s fun is, especially now with AI, like I’m starting to build AI teaching tools. And what AI teaching tools unlock is I get really clear visibility into student outcomes. So now like 14 years in, I can now scale the impact I’m having and actually really measure the impact. So can see in week one, students came in and their interviewing skill was here and by week five, it’s moved the needle so much amount. And so today we have our flagship program, which is called Product Discovery Fundamentals. It’s our introductory course. You get introduced to all the discovery habits. Historically, we’ve offered what are called deep dive courses. These are like, they’re about a single habit. I just decided to sunset all of those courses and it’s not because they weren’t doing well, it’s because I think AI is gonna completely disrupt the way that we train. And so I kind of burned the ships to force myself to reinvent what the future of training looks like.
Brian Bell (47:14): I have a portfolio company that helps professors using AI make coursework more engaging. It’s a company called Advisor.
Teresa Torres (47:22): I’m really into using AI to create deliberate practice. deliberate practice is how do we practice the sub-elements of a skill with expert feedback? So we can create practice opportunities by interacting with Interviewing, for example. We now have all the technology we need for you to practice your interviewing skills by interviewing an LLM. We can even do it over voice.
Brian Bell (47:50): Right?
Teresa Torres (47:50): We can even do it over what looks like a Zoom call with a real human. And then what’s great is I already have an interview coach that can evaluate how well you did in that interview. And so we’re getting to the point where we can just provide infinite practice. This is something we could never do in a live talk course, because we’ve got one or two instructors and a number of students. But now you can practice as much as you want and always have expert feedback. And so I’m really excited about that. Yeah, so we.
Brian Bell (48:15): That’s amazing.
Teresa Torres (48:18): We’re keeping our fundamentals course as is because a lot of big companies use that to get people to level one. Our deep dives used to be like our 201 series, but I’m going to replace all of that with AI-driven training. Yeah.
Brian Bell (48:32): Well you have all the content and now you just have to kind of structure the delivery using AI and voice and interactivity and yeah, that’s amazing. Well, what are you excited about besides that in the coming years?
Teresa Torres (48:45) You know, to be honest, it’s enough. It’s remarkable to me. I’ve shared a little bit of this story publicly, before March of this year, so before March of 2025, I was a consumer of AI, just like all of us. I’d been using chat GPT, I think since December of the month after it came out. But I was busy. I’m running a company of one, and I just didn’t have time to really dive deep.
Teresa Torres (49:13): But in March, I broke my ankle. I had to have ankle surgery. I literally was on the couch for three months. And I decided to use that time to dive deep on AI. And I’m doing it on two paths. I’m building AI products now to support my courses. But I’m also forcing myself to change everything I do in my business. So from a day-to-day operations standpoint. And Cloud Code is just such a remarkable product, even if you’re not an engineer. The way I’m starting to think about it in my head is I am basically building my personal operating system. And in the month of November, all of my blog posts on Product Talk are going be Cloud Code recipes, because I feel like this product unlocks so much productivity for me that I really want to start showing the world what is just now possible. And then it’s funny that I use that phrase, because I do have a new podcast where I interview teams building AI products.
Teresa Torres (50:09): I started building my first AI product and I was like, I don’t know how to do this. Who am I going to learn from? And there wasn’t a lot out there. There’s a lot of snake oil. Like there’s lots of people writing about how to build with AI. But if like you dig a little deeper, they’re not actually building with AI. And so the goal of the podcast is I interview cross-functional product teams. So the builders themselves about their AI products. And it’s super fun. So I’m just, I’m all in. I’m all in on the AI, even if it’s a bubble, I’m just riding the wave.
Brian Bell (50:33): That is really cool.
Brian Bell (50:39): Well, you know, when when companies are adding billions of dollars of revenue like Anthropic is right now in matter of months, I don’t know if it’s a bubble. That’s like a web van. Yeah.
Teresa Torres (50:47): It’s not PetSmart, I can tell you that. Not PetSmart, Pets.com. Sorry, Petsmart, you’re a real business. It’s not Webvan and Pets.com. There is money to be made here. I actually worry more about opening up, just the amount of money they’ve raised and the amount of money they’re spending. Anthropic feels like they’re a little more.
Brian Bell (51:02): Yeah, I do fear for open AI as well. We could look back in there like the CompuServe or the AOL of AI, right? So they have a big target on their backs. They got to stay ahead. I mean, the new Sora model is amazing. What’s that? Yeah, they could end up being like the Yahoo. Yeah.
Teresa Torres (51:15): Maybe even the Yahoo, right? Like the Yahoo, like they’re killing it. They’re killing it, but is it sustainable?
Brian Bell (51:23): Right. Yeah. And, know, like if you’re an investor in the late 90s and, you know, Larry and Sergey come along and you’re like, well, isn’t there like 16 other search engines? You know, it’s a challenge. And maybe there’s another foundational model company none of us have heard of yet that’s going to blow everybody out of the water. So.
Teresa Torres (51:31): There are. just all bad.
Teresa Torres (51:40): I actually, what I would be worried about if I worked at any of the foundational labs is open source models are starting to get really good.
Brian Bell (51:45): The Chinese did the deep six stuff. Yeah, that is danger.
Teresa Torres (51:48): They’re just getting really good. And then if that’s your business, and we’re starting to see this look at both. mean, Gemini has always been this way, but Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing hard into the like consumer and productivity apps. Like they’re getting more into the like use case stuff. And I think it’s because the writing’s on the wall. The model itself will start to become a commodity.
Brian Bell (52:08): Right. It’s a go. fades into the background like the cloud. It’s just kind of there. Right. And it’s undifferentiated and I actually build things that people that, you know, find valuable. Um, let’s, let’s wrap up with some quick rapid fire. Um, one question that comes to mind is, know, the changing nature of product given, given AI, like how are you like, and I asked this earlier, but I’ll kind of say like, how do you like in your crystal ball looking forward in the next three years as AI becomes part and parcel to how we’re doing everything.
Brian Bell (52:37) : How do you see it changing product and maybe blending the roles of product managers and designers and engineers and so forth?
Teresa Torres (52:43) I think part of the reason why I embrace such a continuous mindset is because I’ve learned you can’t predict the future. I can share what I, but I also believe in the William Gibson quote, which is the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. And so if I look at the people right on the edge right now, I think that’s a great way to think about what’s coming. I do think your title is gonna matter a lot less. I think your ability to have agency and be a builder, no matter what your background is, is gonna be really critical. I think there’s this skill, there’s a lot of what my blog posts are gonna focus on in November. There’s this skill of learning how to use LLMs well. And what’s gonna be required to use LLMs well will evolve as the technology evolves. But there’s some fundamental skills, and I don’t just mean prompt engineering. I mean this idea of understanding context windows, understanding how to get the right context in at the right time, understanding how to break complex tasks down in ways that an LLM can excel at the individual pieces when they struggle at the big complex task. There’s like these fundamental kind of like understanding the technology part and then learning how to use it really well, but I think we’ll probably be evergreen. And I think it’s really easy to think those sound like engineering skills, but I see lots of non-technical people learning those skills. Like some of the best marketers right now, people with no coding skills are like, automating everything they do so they can do like 400 campaigns instead of one campaign. That is awesome so I do think that like Agency and curiosity become even more important because this technology when you learn to use it well, I Mean we talked about 10x engineers and I hate that term But I have a feeling It’s a little bit too close to the like hero man
Brian Bell (54:31): Why do you hate that term?
Teresa Torres (54:39): The single man hero myth for me. And don’t get me wrong, I have worked with engineers that have had outsize impact and I do think the best engineers are qualitatively different from most engineers. So I get what’s behind that term. I also hate that everybody thinks they’re a 10X engineer and some people have the gall to label themselves a 10X engineer.
Brian Bell (54:58): Does a 10x product manager exist?
Teresa Torres (55:05): There are product managers that have had 10x impact, right? So like, I guess I struggle with applying it to the person. It’s like you can have 10x impact, but I don’t know that that makes you 10x better.
Brian Bell (55:16): If you have the right tools and the right training, you know, like from product talk, right?
Teresa Torres (55:19): And I think what’s really key, work in the right environment. Like I think we grossly underestimate, like matching the person to the right environment. So someone that struggles in one environment could really excel in another environment. And so I think that’s the part we tend to leave out when we talk about 10x engineers. Like you have a 10x impact in this environment, but you may not in this other environment.
Brian Bell (55:44): Well, I could talk to you for another hour, but I want to be cognizant of your time. Where can folks find you online?
Teresa Torres: So I blog at producttalk.org every Wednesday, a long form article, usually about discovery. These days I’ve been writing a lot about AI, but always with that discovery flavor. So how do we keep it customer centric? And then I have a new podcast. You can find that at justnowpossible.com.
Brian Bell: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on.
Teresa Torres: Thanks for having me.
