Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres is a product discovery expert known for opportunity solution trees and customer interview practices. Here she shares Vistaly’s approach to surfacing customer evidence.
Key Highlights
- Teresa Torres is best known for product discovery methods such as opportunity solution trees and customer interview practices.
- Her recent AI-related commentary focuses on Vistaly, AI-generated tree structure, evidence-backed discovery, and evaluation design.
- She emphasizes that AI PMs should connect model outputs to direct customer evidence rather than rely on prompts alone.
- Her guidance on AI evaluations covers golden datasets, code assertions, LLM-as-a-Judge, customer feedback, and error analysis.
- She also stresses that teams must distinguish model failures from upstream data and system design issues.
At a glance
- Role
- Product discovery expert
- Company
- Independent
- X / Twitter
- @ttorres
Teresa Torres
Overview
Teresa Torres is a product discovery expert best known for popularizing opportunity solution trees and disciplined customer interview practices. In the context of AI product work, her recent mentions center on how those discovery methods are being extended into AI-native workflows through Vistaly, ProductTalk.org, and practical writing on evidence, evaluation, and product decision-making.For AI Product Managers, Teresa Torres matters because she connects classic discovery habits—hearing customer problems directly, structuring opportunities clearly, and testing assumptions—with emerging AI product challenges like tree generation, agent orchestration, evaluation design, error analysis, and evidence-backed decision-making. Her commentary consistently pushes teams to ground AI outputs in customer evidence rather than treat prompt engineering alone as the solution.
Key Developments
- 2026-07-25: Teresa Torres highlighted Hertility Health’s GynAI, noting how it aggregates assessments, lab results, scan images, and clinician conversations into an endometriosis likelihood score that helps clinicians diagnose and refer patients earlier.
- 2026-09-03: She shared a ProductTalk.org guide explaining evals for AI products and workflows, covering error analysis, experiment measurement, golden datasets, code assertions, LLM-as-a-Judge, and customer feedback.
- 2026-09-04: Teresa Torres was noted for creating an in-depth guide to what AI evaluations are and why product teams should use them to maintain quality and build feedback loops.
- 2026-09-08: She argued that a third-party data issue causing an agent to quote a $0 price should surface via production-trace error analysis, but should be fixed with defensive code rather than mislabeled as an agent problem.
- 2026-09-17: Teresa Torres shared a ProductTalk.org article describing how one complaint about a flat, unstructured branch in an AI-generated opportunity solution tree led to a three-week effort with four new AI evaluation metrics and 16 experiment variations.
- 2026-09-20: She recapped Aha!’s view that AI greatly expands the product “shelf,” increasing the importance of strategy and discovery in deciding what deserves to be built and validated.
- 2026-09-21: She shared links to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcast following a discussion about production-ready prototypes and changing PM workflows.
- 2026-10-02: Teresa Torres recapped how Vistaly rebuilt its entire product to explore AI-powered opportunity solution trees, emphasizing that the agents were the easy part relative to the broader product rebuild.
- 2026-10-04: She explained that comparing an input tree with an output tree can produce multiple possible change sets, and that agents need rules for meaningful moves—such as semantic merges versus deletions—and logging of each move as the tree is built.
- 2026-10-05: Teresa Torres shared an episode in which Steve of Vistaly said teams rarely change their minds until they hear customers describe problems in their own words; Vistaly addresses this by attaching interview evidence directly to opportunity solution trees.
Relevance to AI PMs
1. Use customer evidence to validate AI-generated structure Teresa Torres’s Vistaly-related examples show that AI-generated opportunity trees should not stand on their own. PMs should connect generated opportunities back to customer interview evidence so teams can inspect whether the model’s structure reflects real user problems.2. Treat evals as part of product management, not just ML quality control
Her writing on AI evaluations gives PMs a practical framework for defining correctness, measuring output quality over time, and combining methods such as golden datasets, code assertions, LLM-as-a-Judge, and customer feedback.
3. Separate agent failures from system failures
Her point about the $0 pricing issue is highly tactical for AI PMs: not every bad output is an LLM problem. Teams should use production-trace error analysis to locate failures, then fix the right layer—data pipelines, business logic, orchestration, or model behavior.
Related
- Vistaly: Closely connected through discussion of AI-powered opportunity solution trees and attaching interview evidence directly to discovery artifacts.
- ProductTalk.org: Teresa Torres’s publishing platform for guides and articles on discovery practices, AI evals, and AI-assisted product work.
- Opportunity Solution Tree / input-tree / output-tree: Core concepts in her work, especially in recent discussion about how AI systems construct, compare, and revise trees.
- AI evaluations / AI evaluation metrics / production-trace error analysis: Recurring themes in her recent content, showing how discovery-oriented PM thinking can be applied to AI reliability.
- Aha / Builder: Mentioned in her recap of how AI changes prototyping and expands the feasible set of products teams can test.
- Steve: Referenced in a Vistaly episode Teresa Torres shared about using direct customer language to help teams update their beliefs.
- Hertility Health / GynAI: Example she highlighted to show practical AI aggregation and decision support in a healthcare workflow.
Frequently asked questions
What is Teresa Torres?
Teresa Torres is a product discovery expert known for opportunity solution trees and customer interview practices. Here she shares Vistaly’s approach to surfacing customer evidence.
What should AI product managers know about Teresa Torres?
Teresa Torres is best known for product discovery methods such as opportunity solution trees and customer interview practices. Her recent AI-related commentary focuses on Vistaly, AI-generated tree structure, evidence-backed discovery, and evaluation design. She emphasizes that AI PMs should connect model outputs to direct customer evidence rather than rely on prompts alone.
Explore this topic
Newsletter Mentions (53)
“Teresa Torres shared an episode in which Steve of Vistaly says teams rarely change their minds until they hear customers describe problems in their own words.”
#15 𝕏 Teresa Torres shared an episode in which Steve of Vistaly says teams rarely change their minds until they hear customers describe problems in their own words. Vistaly puts interview evidence directly on opportunity solution trees to help teams hear, see, and align on the real problems.
“Teresa Torres recapped how comparing an input tree with an output tree can yield multiple change sets, though only one may tell the real story.”
GenAI PM Daily - Perplexity Computer now generates interactive 3D learning visualizations October 04, 2026 GenAI PM Daily 🎧 Listen to this brief 3 min listen Today's top 12 insights for PM Builders from X and LinkedIn. Perplexity Computer now generates interactive 3D learning visualizations #4 𝕏 Teresa Torres recapped how comparing an input tree with an output tree can yield multiple change sets, though only one may tell the real story. Her fix: give the agent rules for meaningful moves—distinguishing a semantic merge from deletion and source reassignment—and log each move as it builds the tree.
“Teresa Torres recapped how Vistaly rebuilt its entire product to explore AI-powered opportunity solution trees, noting that the agents were the easy part.”
#12 𝕏 Teresa Torres recapped how Vistaly rebuilt its entire product to explore AI-powered opportunity solution trees, noting that the agents were the easy part.
“She shared links to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcast.”
Teresa Torres recapped how repeated requests for production-ready prototypes reshaped Aha!’s roadmap, prompting it to build tooling that lets product managers with zero coding experience build, run, and operate working applications themselves. She shared links to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcast.
“Teresa Torres recapped Brian of Aha!’s argument that as AI expands the product “shelf” from maybe 1,000 SKUs to 10,000, product managers must use strategy and discovery to choose what deserves a place.”
#8 𝕏 Teresa Torres recapped Brian of Aha!’s argument that as AI expands the product “shelf” from maybe 1,000 SKUs to 10,000, product managers must use strategy and discovery to choose what deserves a place. She says Builder turns roadmap strategy into deployable prototypes, collects real feedback, and promotes validated ideas into production.
“Teresa Torres shared a producttalk.org article about how one customer complaint about a flat, unstructured branch in an AI-generated opportunity solution tree prompted a three-week effort involving 4 new AI evaluation metrics and 16 different experiment variations.”
#11 𝕏 Teresa Torres shared a producttalk.org article about how one customer complaint about a flat, unstructured branch in an AI-generated opportunity solution tree prompted a three-week effort involving 4 new AI evaluation metrics and 16 different experiment variations. She says reliable AI products need evals, guardrails, and orchestration—not just prompt engineering—and may benefit from agents that audit and correct their own work.
“#5 𝕏 Teresa Torres said an unhandled third-party data issue that causes an agent to quote a $0 price should be caught through production-trace error analysis—but the real fix is defensive code for handling third-party data, not treating it as an agent error.”
#5 𝕏 Teresa Torres said an unhandled third-party data issue that causes an agent to quote a $0 price should be caught through production-trace error analysis—but the real fix is defensive code for handling third-party data, not treating it as an agent error.
“Teresa Torres recently created an in-depth guide explaining what AI evaluations are and why product teams should use them.”
Teresa Torres recently created an in-depth guide explaining what AI evaluations are and why product teams should use them. Evals measure AI product or workflow performance, helping teams maintain quality, catch issues before they reach users, and create a feedback loop similar to interviewing and assumption testing.
“Teresa Torres shared a producttalk.org guide to evals for AI products and workflows, covering error analysis, experiment measurement, and four types of evals: golden datasets, code assertions, LLM-as-a-Judge, and customer feedback.”
Teresa Torres shared a producttalk.org guide to evals for AI products and workflows, covering error analysis, experiment measurement, and four types of evals: golden datasets, code assertions, LLM-as-a-Judge, and customer feedback. She says teams must define product-specific correctness and measure how often LLM outputs are right rather than rely on a single test.
“𝕏 Teresa Torres highlights Hertility Health’s GynAI, which aggregates online assessments, lab results, scan images, and clinician conversations into a clear endometriosis likelihood score.”
𝕏 Teresa Torres highlights Hertility Health’s GynAI, which aggregates online assessments, lab results, scan images, and clinician conversations into a clear endometriosis likelihood score. This empowers doctors to diagnose and refer women for care much earlier in the process.
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