Behind the Craft · Sunday, September 13, 2026
Pedro Franceschi of Brex explains their strategy to compress product development cycles by internalizing customer signals and external opportunities quickly. He emphasizes that PMs at Brex now use internal tooling to ingest customer context and make tradeoff decisions, leading to faster and more accurate product shipping.
“The way I describe the quality of an engineering uh, in a product organization is how quickly it takes between ingesting some signal out there in the world about your customer, about a pain point, about an opportunity.”
“Internalizing that into a product or a feature or whatever it is and then shipping something that works and addresses the pain point and put it in front of a customer. So what we're trying to do is compress cycles in that loop.”
“And we, we, at Brex, a lot of the role of PM evolved over the past couple of years where for a long time, I would say maybe five years ago, I think there was this view that PMs ran the show and PMs were, you know, the ones designing the product, they were thinking about how the tradeoffs of how things work, they were debating which opportunities were, there was this whole like PM is the mini CEO.”
“And obviously PMs specifically at Brex, became a lot more about how do you use a lot of the tooling that we built internally to just ingest context about customers and and really what's happening on the ground, especially with a sales team.”