Unpacking Innovation - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that innovation is a means of solving a customer's problem, and that teams which chase novelty build complex products customers then have to learn.

Teresa Torres, who writes Product Talk, and Petra Wille host the podcast All Things Product. In a 12-minute episode they ask whether innovation should be a product team's goal. Torres argues that teams which aim for novelty often build complex products that serve customers no better, and Wille argues that removing steps is itself a form of innovation.

• They trace how logging in changed, from passwords to single sign-on, to the one-time links Slack sent by email, to password managers and passkeys. Each new method changed the industry and then became the next source of friction.
• Every novel flow asks users to learn a new system, which the hosts count as a cost beside the cost of building it.
• A solution can be new for the business or the technology and still look ordinary to the customer.
• They say good innovation tends to come from a cross-functional team, when research shows a real customer struggle and an engineer knows a newer, easier way to solve it.

A team that can now build a novel feature quickly with AI tools can still ask whether it makes the customer's task simpler. The episode does not mention AI, so this is an inference. This account comes from the open show notes, because the transcript is for paying subscribers.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Innovation is a means, not the goal — it only matters when it serves the customer better.

2 October 2026: teams building with AI agents are deciding in advance, and writing down, where the agent stops and a person checks: in product code, in what the product promises users, and in visibility of agent behaviour.