Pivoting is really hard.
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Pivoting is really hard.
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#2Love your idea, but don't love it too much, because there's a good chance it won't last.
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#3It depends on the situation.
Sometimes pivoting is easy, because you've been struggling with a crappy product, everyone knows you need to change something, and you're getting an incredible response for a landing page you threw up on a whim over the weekend. So pivot - easy call.
Sometimes pivoting is hard, because you're making some money, employees are happy, but you're convinced that in six months your market segment won't exist any more.
It just depends.
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#4It is really hard. As a matter of fact, "pivoting" is a bit too easy a word to use. Kind of like when "shell shock" was replaced by "battle fatigue".
A pivot is typically a center point, such as a pin or pole, on which something anchored to it can rotate. This is pretty easy if you're a pin or a pole, as you were probably constructed with this type of operation in mind beforehand.
Teams are not constructed with this capability in mind. We optimize based on current plans, not on potential future plans. As such, the only real pin in a team's pivot capability is their mental capacity to switch off plan A and go to plan B.
This is hard to do, consciously or otherwise. Most people need the time to wind down, process their thoughts to understand why the idea they've been working on is no longer feasible. This is a big mental leap, even for the most prepared. Some struggle for a while. Some never get there. One thing's for sure -- it rarely if ever shifts simultaneously for everyone on a team.
Pivoting is the other shoe that drops as a result of "failing faster". Indeed, it's a necessary tactic if one wishes to stay in business. But, because of the makeup of teams and original plans, efforts to pivot seems to fail more often than not.
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#5This is one of the reasons to keep the team as small as possible and invest as little effort as possible in your idea to validate it. The less you have invested, the less you have to throw away when it turns out the idea wasn't so great in the first place, and the easier it'll be to make that mental context switch.
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#6It's an interesting post, because there are probably two types of 'pivots':
1) Change the solution to the problem you're solving 2) Change the problem you're solving
(1) is a lot easier than (2).
I think the key here is to love the problem you're solving - if you've chosen a big enough problem (or important enough), then there should always be a market for a solution... don't get discouraged when the particular solution you tried doesn't work... you just need to find a new one that will.
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#7This view on pivoting reflects the Groupon pivot fallacy where you just dramatically change your business model and, poof, you're a billionaire.
What we've found to be a more tolerable, easy-to-execute view on pivoting is to say, we know what general problem we're focused on solving, but we don't know exactly how to solve it.
Pivots are therefore continual and small. We probe in various directions hypothesizing that a certain approach might help us make headway. Among other things, lowering the stakes and testing in small, bite-sized pieces will make it much easier to sell a new idea to your team.
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#8Relevant post: "Why Lean Startups are Hard Part"[1]
[1] http://kevindewalt.com/blog/2011/08/05/why-lean-startups-are...
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#9If you're truly pivoting, and not just giving up and changing plans, then one would imagine that you can latch onto the common thread between the old and new direction as a means of motivating the team. If you're building a new product towards the same vision, focus on the vision, if you're re-using technology built but towards a different vision, focus on the technology.
Re: Pivoting is really hard.
#10It's an interesting post, because there are probably two types of 'pivots': 1) Change the solution to the problem you're solving 2) Change the problem you're solving (1) is a lot easier than (2). I think the key here is to love the problem you're solving - if you've chosen a big enough problem (or important enough), then there should always be a market for a solution... don't get discouraged when the particular solut…
To me pivoting implies #1. You're pivoting around a problem to attack it from another angle.
If you're doing #2 then you're not pivoting, you're walking away to a different place entirely.