The twice-weekly ProductBrew digest for software product teams: ten items, five minutes, every source checked.
Mind the Product defines the Forward Deployed PM: employed by a vendor, embedded in a customer's organisation, paired with a Forward Deployed Engineer. The pattern traces to Palantir around 2010. The pull is AI: value appears only once a model is wired into a customer's data, workflows and people.
The CRA covers hardware and software products with digital elements sold in the EU. Full obligations apply from December 2027, but the first reporting requirements began in September 2026. Products must meet 13 requirements, including secure defaults, being updatable when a flaw is found, and letting customers delete or move their data.
Andy Peatling argues the product-centric view, where every task must route through your app, has an expiry date once agents work across all of a person's tools. A person-centric product opens its capabilities to any agent and still brings its UI components, expertise, data moat and follow-through.
Cagan reframes 'outcomes vs output'. You can't get outcomes without output, so the root cause is the desire for predictability. He calls his biggest INSPIRED regret underestimating how deeply that desire runs, and notes some situations still demand real predictability.
Jeff Gothelf sorted 29 comments on where project work lands: 13 said project managers thrive outside the tech team, 9 said product managers absorbed it, 6 named other roles such as TPM or product ops. His point: whoever owns it, it consumes real capacity.
Product Mindset reworks 15 models across five decisions, with a 46-model reference table. Example: Jevons paradox means cheaper intelligence raises total spend, so agents are a volume story, and the true unit cost is cost per solved task, not price per token.
RevenueCat's guide says subscription apps win with three things at once: heart, distribution and monetization. Heart starts with a sharply specific user and onboarding questions in their own words; the author reports 5–7% paywall conversion uplifts from such a rewrite.
Cherokee became the first Native American language in iOS in 2010; the Cherokee Nation has about 1,500 active speakers, most over 70. Apple says the iOS keyboard supports 200+ languages and variants, adding Blackfoot, Comanche and Northern East Cree in iOS 27. The work starts with Unicode.
John Cutler revisits his 2016 post and retires the 'X vs. Y' binaries he helped popularise.
Linear's Karri Saarinen on why additive features make products messy without a point of view.
Three of this issue's pieces say the same thing from different chairs: the product is moving out of its own building, into the customer's office, the user's agent and the regulator's checklist. Design for being visited less and trusted more. — ProductBrew