Building AI Products - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts

In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille flips the script and asks Teresa Torres a big, timely question: How do product teams learn to build AI-powered products—beyond just dabbling with ChatGPT? Teresa shares fresh insights from her own experience building a real AI product over the past several months, breaking down the unique skills, workflows, and cross-functional collaboration patterns required for success.

You’ll hear why building AI features is more like orchestrating a team of interns than just writing a killer prompt, and how practices like observability, evals, and ongoing maintenance need to evolve for the LLM era. If you’re a product person figuring out where AI fits in your org, this conversation will give you a clear, practical starting point.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

The difference between an AI-powered product manager and an AI product manager
Why prompt engineering for a product is different from prompting ChatGPT for personal use
The role of prompt decomposition and orchestration in building robust AI features
How to think about system design, risk mitigation, and cross-functional collaboration
Why observability and logging traces are critical for LLM products
The challenge of evaluating non-deterministic AI features (and why “thumbs up/thumbs down” isn’t enough)
How to decide when AI is the right solution for a customer problem
The hidden cost of ongoing maintenance for AI features

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