Show Notes
Is "taste" the must-have skill of the AI era — or just the latest tech buzzword? In this episode, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres unpack the growing hype around taste as a differentiating human trait in a world where AI is eating through design, delivery, and discovery. Teresa pushes back hard: taste is rarely defined, can't be easily taught, and risks becoming a cover story for "my preference trumps yours." Petra adds nuance, acknowledging the real pattern-recognition that comes from years of product experience — while questioning whether it's actually worth investing in. Together they trace the idea back to its roots: product sense, founder mode, and the enduring myth of the lone visionary. What they land on instead? Discovery skills, customer understanding, and learning to collaborate with AI — because taste without evidence is just opinion.
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?