Teams reach for a vector store and call it "memory." But what the agent remembers, when it forgets, and what it chooses to surface are decisions a user feels directly — they shape trust, privacy, and whether the thing seems to actually know them.
That makes memory a product surface, not an implementation detail. Someone has to own the policy: retention windows, what's promotable from a session into long-term state, what the user can see and delete.
I wrote the longer version of this as a taxonomy of agentic memory. The short version: if no one on the product side owns memory, the context budget ends up owning it for you, badly.