MCP Is Not Just a Developer Thing. Your Product Team Needs to Understand It Too.

I want to talk about something that keeps coming up in product conversations and almost always lands the same way.

A developer mentions MCP. The product manager nods. The meeting moves on. Nobody stops to ask what it actually changes.

That is a problem, because Model Context Protocol changes quite a bit, and the implications are not just technical.

So What Is MCP, Actually?

Model Context Protocol is an open standard that defines how AI models connect to external tools, data sources, and services. Before MCP, every AI integration was essentially custom glue code: a one-off connection between a model and a specific tool, built differently every time, maintained separately from everything else.