The Call to Adventure

Teresa Torres recounts how, starting as a complete AI beginner after an ankle injury in March 2025, she transformed her product-discovery work over about fifteen months. She moved from using ChatGPT as a search engine to building live AI products, including an Interview Coach, opportunity-tree tooling with Vistaly, an Outcome Coach, and a TeresaBot. She frames the story as an example of small steps compounding rather than a blueprint to copy. Her core message is that changing roles and tools can feel daunting, but it can also be a source of learning and fun, and that people should answer the call to adventure by taking a first step.

01Key takeaways

• Start with a small, low-risk experiment in your own work before trying to ship anything for customers.
• Improve the quality of your inputs, such as interview skill, before relying on AI to synthesize them.
• Evals are a feedback loop: look at what the AI gets wrong, measure those errors, then improve them.
• Learning context management, memory, and feedback loops through personal tools transfers directly to building production AI products.
• Expect beginner struggle and treat it as part of the reward, taking one small step at a time.
• Use AI tools as expert tutors to close skill gaps quickly, including engineering skills.

02Key sections

Starting from zero

An ankle injury left Torres sidelined for weeks, and she began experimenting with AI as a total novice. She was initially skeptical that AI could change discovery work.

Focusing on interview quality

Rather than automating synthesis, she chose to improve how interviews are conducted, building an AI coach that evaluates interviews against a structured rubric. This led to learning evals as an ongoing feedback loop.

Learning to build by doing

Personal experiments with agents and task systems taught her context management and feedback loops, skills she then applied to production products. Her podcast and mentors helped accelerate the learning.

Struggle and reward

Shipping a production product meant learning engineering basics from scratch, and a hard bug consumed two weeks. She argues the difficulty is what made the experience rewarding.

Answering the call

Torres connects her year to the hero's journey and urges listeners to take teeny-tiny first steps, find mentors, and embrace change rather than avoid it.

03From the post

“In June, I returned to Product at Heart in Hamburg, Germany. I love this event. Arne Kittler and Petra Wille do such an amazing job of curating a thoughtful lineup of speakers and they obsess over the attendee experience. If you are looking for a high-quality product conference, I”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.