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

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What happens when a product leader accidentally becomes an AI engineer? In this episode, Teresa Torres shares how she went from occasional tinkerer to spending 60% of her time doing real engineering work — building AI-powered tools for continuous discovery, forming a licensing partnership with Vistaly, and quietly constructing "Teresa Bot," an AI discovery coach trained on everything she's ever written.

Teresa and Petra dig into what AI engineering actually looks like in practice: context engineering, prompt writing, RAG, observability, evals, and why Teresa thinks product managers who want to do great discovery might secretly be data scientists at heart. They also bust the myth that you need a strong engineering background to build in this space — and make the case that the most important skill right now isn't coding. It's being willing to learn.

Topics Covered

  • Teresa's accidental path into AI engineering

  • Her partnership with Vistaly

  • Building "Teresa Bot"

  • How she learned — and how you can too

  • Discovery skills transfer directly to AI engineering

  • On her engineering background (and why it's not what you think)

  • The real takeaway

Key Quotes

"I know anything that I don't know how to do, Claude will teach me how to do. And Claude is infinitely patient." — Teresa Torres

"I don't want to build all that stuff. I don't really want to be a software company. I'm almost set up like an AI researcher." — Teresa Torres

"The moment I learned more about data science, all of my discovery work became so different." — Petra Wille

Resources & Links:

Mentioned in this episode:

Petra Wille