Show Notes
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 loops to reorient.
More from All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
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?
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.
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?
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.
What if the ideas you throw away tell you more about the health of your product process than the ones you ship?