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What AI Changes - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Everyone’s shouting that AI changes everything. Teresa Torres wrote a LinkedIn “screed” arguing the opposite — and this episode is the debate she and Petra wanted to have about it.

Petra Wille and Teresa Torres work through the spiciest “AI changes everything” claims they’ve heard lately and sort what’s actually new from what was always true. They dig into teams drowning in untested AI-written code (an AI problem, or a team that never had automated testing?), the “Scrum is dead” crowd who quietly renamed their one-week iterations, and the claim that discovery and customer interviews are obsolete now that “delivery is free.” Then they take on the big one: is AI killing SaaS? Using Airtable and Miro — and the Bending Spoons acquisitions — Teresa argues it’s not AI at all, but bad product decisions and a venture-capital “winner takes all” mindset. They close on where things genuinely shift: hyper-personalized software.

A spicy, grounding listen for anyone tired of the hype.

Key Takeaways

  • AI rarely creates new problems — it exposes the ones a team already had, like no automated testing or no clear process.
  • Frameworks like Scrum may fade, but the work they stand for — planning, aligning, reviewing, measuring — doesn’t go anywhere.
  • Building with agents needs more coordination, not less: plans, loops, and graphs are just rituals and ceremonies by another name.
  • Story-based interviewing was never about your product — it’s about the customer’s real past experiences, which AI doesn’t change.
  • “Delivery is free, so skip discovery” leaves you unable to learn why something failed — it’s just spaghetti at the wall.
  • AI isn’t killing SaaS. Losing focus on your core product (Airtable) and raising too much VC (Miro) are self-inflicted wounds.
  • “One winner takes the whole market” is mostly a VC story — and chasing it actually lowers a company’s odds of success.
  • What genuinely shifts: hyper-personalization, with providers (like Notion’s building blocks) letting customers mix and match.

Notable Moments

  • 🗣️ “Maybe AI is exposing what was already broken.” — Teresa
  • 🗣️ “How do you even work with other people if you’re not having a conversation about who’s doing what by when?” — Teresa
  • 🗣️ “Story-based interviewing was never ‘tell me about my product.’ It’s about the customer.” — Teresa
  • 🗣️ “AI didn’t kill Airtable. The Airtable team getting distracted from their core value killed Airtable.” — Teresa
  • 🗣️ “Get your processes in order, get your rhythms in order, have your rituals still going.” — Petra

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