How to Become Indispensable When Your Skills Are Being Commoditized

I worked with a C-level leader at a top-tier consulting firm who always said, "everybody is replaceable."

He was right.

In today's work environment, nobody is "unfireable." Businesses have a vested interest in making sure every person is, in fact, replaceable. It keeps the operation simple and the workforce manageable.

But the point he was really making was while anyone can be replaced, some people are so expensive, time-consuming, and operationally difficult to replace that the business simply can't afford to do it.

The choice is not between being "replaceable" and "irreplaceable." The choice is between being easy to replace and becoming strategically indispensable.

I watched this exact scenario play out at a company you’ve heard of.

A highly-skilled engineer. Top-tier school. Could code circles around anyone in the building. Shipped features that moved the needle.

Then the restructure came. He was gone in the first round.

Meanwhile, a product manager, decent not exceptional, not only survived but got promoted.

What did she have that he didn’t?

The engineer was excellent. That's easy to replace at an elite company. The PM was indispensable. She had made herself too expensive and time-consuming to fire.

She wasn't just shipping work. She was the person who could translate engineering timelines into marketing goals and revenue metrics. She owned the dashboard that three different VPs relied on. She organized the quarterly team dinners where she learned what actually motivated people.

When layoffs came, every executive in that room knew: “If we cut her, we lose visibility into half our key initiatives.”

At elite companies, everyone is smart, has credentials, and ships work.

The people who thrive, the ones who survive layoffs and climb the ladder, understand how to operate. They are not more ruthless, they are more strategic. They are not "selling out"; they are leading. They make themselves invaluable to the organization, not just the codebase.

This is the playbook for becoming the person your organization can't afford to lose.

The Naive Move: Keeping your head down, staying in your silo, and just "doing your job."

The Operator's Play: You become the indispensable glue that connects all the silos.

I was part of a high-stakes e-commerce redesign right before the holiday season. The project was a convergence of competing goals: Performance Marketing (all numbers), Product Marketing (all brand), Engineering (all tech stack), and Legal (all compliance).

The solution was a steering committee. I brought the functional operators from every discipline into one room. We built a shared language, a shared document, and a shared set of deadlines.

The breakthrough came in week three. The brand marketing lead said, “I finally understand why engineering keeps pushing back on our requests. We’ve been asking for things that would destroy load times.”

That is the sound of silos breaking. When people start speaking each other’s language, the project accelerates. We shipped on time, hit our revenue targets, and nobody got thrown under the bus. You create shared understanding across the organization.

The Naive Move: Waiting for your manager to define the metrics for your project.

The Operator's Play: You create the dashboard. You define the metrics of success for them.

In any new project, there is chaos. People often do not even know what to measure. The person who steps into that chaos and creates clarity gains immediate "soft power." The person who builds the dashboard defines the game.

I saw this in action at a top-tier VC firm. A colleague managing their talent marketplace made himself invaluable by creating the spreadsheet... the system... that made sense of their entire recruiting process.

This is not a "secretary" task. This is owning the framework of success. By building the report, you get to frame the narrative from day one. You ensure the dashboard highlights your team's contributions, in the terms you know the C-suite values.

The Naive Move: Believing that "not wanting to take credit" is a virtue.

The Operator'S Play: You understand that recognition is a high-performance fuel, and you use it to build an army of allies.

I once reviewed a QBR deck from an engineering team. It was full of technical details. Buried on page 8 was the real story: they had automated a client process from five days down to 30 seconds.

We made it the headline.

That engineer got recognized by the client’s CTO in the next meeting. Six months later, they got promoted. When I needed support for a controversial decision later that year, they were the first person to have my back.

This is what happens when you make sure excellent work gets the recognition it deserves.

The Naive Move: Thinking team-building events are a waste of time.

The Operator's Play: You understand that human trust is built outside of 10 AM Zoom calls.

I organized a taco dinner with a group of engineers at a conference in Denver. No booze by default, which made it inclusive and lowered the pressure.

One engineer mentioned, almost casually, that he was frustrated because his manager kept assigning him "junior-level work" even though he’d been pushing to lead more strategic initiatives.

Three months later, when I was staffing a high-visibility project, I remembered that conversation. I brought him in as tech lead. He crushed it. And he became one of my strongest advocates inside that organization.

I learned that in a 20-minute conversation over tacos. I never would have learned it on a Zoom call. You are gathering intelligence that makes you a better operator.

The Naive Move: Staying in your silo and letting "user research" be someone else's job.

The Operator's Play: You end stupid internal debates by becoming the source of external truth.

At a SaaS company I consulted, we were constantly debating cockamamie ideas for new features. One product manager was convinced a particular feature would drive massive adoption. Another thought it would confuse users. The debate went in circles for weeks.

The solution? We built a "fake door"—a simple landing page for the concept—and ran a few hundred dollars in ad traffic to it.

The conversion rate was 0.2%. The feature would have tanked. We killed it before spending six months building something nobody wanted.

The debate ended instantly. When you bring real customer data to an opinion-based argument, you become the source of truth.

If you are reading this and thinking "I don't want to play politics," you are missing the point. These are leadership fundamentals.

The C-level exec was right. Everyone is replaceable. The smooth-talker who’s beating you is not more talented. They are just strategically harder to replace. You can do the same thing without compromising your integrity.

The choice is not between staying pure and selling out. The choice is between staying an easy-to-replace commodity or becoming a strategically indispensable asset.

This is the kind of framework we discuss every Tuesday in the Suit & Artist newsletter. If you're tired of being replaceable, this is where you learn to become indispensable.

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