Just Now Possible

When ChatGPT launched, Stack Overflow faced a cataclysmic shift: developer behavior was changing overnight. In this episode, Teresa Torres talks with Ellen Brandenburger, former product leader at Stack Overflow, about how her team navigated the disruption, prototyped AI features, and eventually built an entirely new business line. Ellen shares the inside story of Overflow AI—from the first scrappy prototypes of conversational search, through multiple iterations with semantic search and RAG, to the tough decision to roll the product back when it couldn’t meet developer standards. She also explains how Stack Overflow turned a looming threat into opportunity by creating technical benchmarks and licensing its Q&A corpus to AI labs. This episode offers a rare look at what it really takes to adapt when a platform-defining shift hits—and what product managers, designers, and engineers can learn about prototyping, evaluating quality, and building in uncertainty.

How AI products come to life—straight from the builders themselves. In each episode, we dive deep into how teams spotted a customer problem, experimented with AI, prototyped solutions, and shipped real features. We dig into everything from workflows and agents to RAG and evaluation strategies, and explore how their products keep evolving. If you’re building with AI, these are the stories for you. The first full episode drops on Thursday, September 18th. Don't miss it!