Pivot
Why it matters
Most founders pivot too late. Admitting a direction is wrong feels like failure, so months go into a plan the market keeps rejecting. A clean pivot made on real evidence preserves the research, relationships and code already paid for, and cuts only the dead part.
A pivot is not the same as drifting. Drift happens when each week brings a new idea. A pivot is one named change with a reason.
How to apply it
- Write down what has been learned that is worth keeping before deciding what to change.
- Point to specific evidence, such as activation data or interview patterns, that the current direction is not working.
- Change one thing at a time: the customer, the product or the use case.
- Give the new direction a short, fixed window to show results.
- Tell the team and customers plainly what changed and why.
What it is
Eric Ries popularised the word in The Lean Startup. The image is a basketball player who keeps one foot planted and moves the other. One thing stays fixed and one thing changes.
There are three common forms. Keep the product and change the customer. Keep the customer and change the product. Keep the underlying skill or technology and rebuild the offer around a new use.
Say a founder spends six months on a scheduling tool for agencies. Agencies sign up but never invite their clients. The founder keeps everything learned about agency workflows and rebuilds the product for the client-facing side of the same process.
Common mistakes
- Pivoting after one bad week instead of a clear pattern.
- Changing everything at once, which makes it impossible to learn which change worked.
- Pivoting away from a problem that was real because selling it was hard.
