Later this month I'll be hosting two mini-workshops on the skills that I think will differentiate the best product teams from the rest. AI Evals: The New Discovery Habit 🗓️ September 23, 2026, 9am-10:30am PDT In this session, you'll get introduced to what AI evals are, you'll receive a blueprint…
Julie Zhuo's paid essay opens with Andy Warhol's point that every Coke tastes the same regardless of who drinks it, then uses that idea to frame a discussion of software. The piece appears to argue that digital products…
🎙️Facilitation Skills Conflict on a product team isn't a warning sign — the absence of it usually is. In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres tackle a question Teresa hears constantly: what should a product trio do when collaboration breaks down and disagreement turns…
This podcast episode argues that conflict on a product team is normal and even healthy, while its total absence often signals a psychological safety problem. Petra Wille and Teresa Torres explore how trios should handle…
This essay explores a common feeling among product people: that they are the only one who thinks a certain way inside their company, even though conferences or outside conversations suggest otherwise. The author argues…
This question... I have spent far too many hours contemplating it. I have discovered multiple answers depending on how deep you want to go. The most pragmatic answer: you want to win a marathon, not a sprint. Too much sprinting makes you worse at marathons. The hard part, of course, is knowing how…
AI evals have been the "it" skill for product teams for over a year. I've even called evals a new discovery habit. But I still meet product teams who only have a vague idea of what evals are. And it's not their fault. Most of the writing on this topic is intended for engineers or just isn't…
John Cutler argues that AI tools can reduce the cost of gathering and reusing context, which he calls a 'recontextualization tax' that teams pay whenever knowledge has to be re-explained across people, documents, and…
"The only way to know if our AI products and workflows are any good is with evals." 💡 If you're using AI to write PRDs, analyze customer feedback, or build customer-facing AI products, you need to understand evals. This guide breaks down what evals actually are and why product teams should be…
Teresa Torres introduces a practical test harness for running AI product evals. Manually running every input through a prompt, saving outputs, scoring them against evals, and repeating for each prompt variant is…
Teresa Torres argues that AI evals should be a core discovery habit for product teams, not just an engineering concern. Because LLM outputs are probabilistic and semantic, traditional pass/fail unit tests don't work…
Too many teams are doing AI transformation poorly, so I wrote down everything I have learned in my journey and in chatting with many other leaders. A long read, so get your coffees.
Julie Zhuo's paid essay argues that an AI transformation cannot be ordered into existence from the top down. It presents a ten-step guide to leading an AI shift in a way that preserves care for people and their sense of…
Jason Fried reports the results of an experiment where a free event charged a refundable $100 admission, returned at the door to attendees who showed up. Of 55 paid signups, 50 attended, a 90% show rate, compared with…
Jason Fried describes an experiment for a free in-person Basecamp event in Chicago: attendees pay a $100 refundable deposit at registration and get the cash back at the door if they show up. The problem is that free…
John Cutler examines the sudden enthusiasm for measuring "return on tokens" as AI usage grows inside companies. He argues that vendors and executives eager for clean numbers are reaching for yet another proxy, much like…
John Cutler argues that teams often prioritize better when they pay attention to the underlying tensions they observe and act on daily, rather than focusing mainly on the specific items being prioritized. Those items…
Marty Cagan reflects on the many competing definitions of the product role and argues that how a product person defines their job reveals a lot about their experience. He highlights an analysis by technology analyst…
John Cutler, writing in response to a friend who wanted his unpolished, opinionated view, presents a set of candid operating takes for product and team leaders. The piece's premise is that leaders often hedge or present…
Julie Zhuo writes a letter to her 11-year-old daughter about the value of struggling through hard work when AI can make almost anything effortless. The piece frames the problem as a question of cultivating the eye…
"I'm going to tell you my story because I think it's an amazing story of continuous improvement, of how teeny-tiny steps compound over time." Over the past year, my work has transformed completely—and it all started with a broken ankle and a willingness to get curious about AI. In this article, I…
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…
"It can feel like you are the lone champion pushing for change in your organization." That's why we are reading Continuous Discovery Habits together throughout 2026. 📚 The book turns five this year and many of you have bought and read it. But reading isn't the same as doing. So we are reading…
This reading-guide post kicks off a monthly book club around Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits, focusing on Chapter 9, which covers identifying hidden assumptions. The chapter argues that teams should test the…