Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach, bestselling author of Continuous Discovery Habits, and founder of Product Talk Academy. After years helping teams at companies like Spotify and Capital One rethink how they make product decisions, she’s become one of the clearest voices on modern product discovery.

With decades of hands-on experience across scrappy startups and global product orgs, Teresa brings sharp insights on customer interviews, continuous learning, decision-making, and the messy psychology behind why teams still ship the wrong things. In this episode, she breaks down why conviction makes founders great—and also gets them into trouble—how AI is reshaping product work, and why the best PMs operate with agency, curiosity, and a builder’s mindset.

In this episode, she discusses how she stumbled into human-centered design, why product cultures go sideways, what great discovery feels like in practice, and how AI is quietly rewriting the rules for PMs, designers, and engineers.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

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

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