I spoke to a Head of Product this week who is facing cutbacks.
The instinct in that moment: keep your head down. Don’t stand out, don’t spend, survive.
But heads-down puts your fate completely in someone else’s hands.
If your job is on the line: step up.
Walk into your CEO’s office and ask specifically:
I want to use AI as leverage during these cutbacks, so we stay productive and keep momentum for the other side. My ideas: two quick wins. Is that of value, or do you need something else from me, so we come out of this swinging?
The quick wins
The two quick wins I suggested
01
An internal MCP server on your data warehouse
AI ↔ your data warehouseMCP is the plug that lets AI tools talk to your systems. Point it at your datalake or warehouse. Now every product person can ask the data questions directly, in plain language.
No ticket to the data team, no three-day wait.
Cutbacks make the data team smaller. This keeps the answers flowing anyway.
02
Self-healing documentation
Docs that update themselvesDocumentation goes stale the day you write it. So automate the updating.
Wire an agent to your releases and code changes, and let it propose documentation updates on every change.
Fewer people means less knowledge in heads. Your knowledge has to live somewhere that maintains itself.
Why this works: your CEO starts thinking about you as part of what comes after the cutbacks.
And if it doesn’t work? You spent your last months there on relevant, modern projects. Your next hiring conversation just got easier.
Either way you win.
That’s the point of stepping up.
