handbooksPivot or persevere
The meeting every startup postpones, why postponing it is expensive, and the ten kinds of pivot so you can name the one you are considering.
- Hold a scheduled pivot-or-persevere meeting, at least monthly. Waiting for an obvious moment means waiting too long.
- A pivot is a change of direction that keeps what you learned. It is not starting over, and it is not failure.
- Ten named kinds. Naming the one you mean turns a vague worry into a decision.
- Vanity metrics are what let a team persevere for a year on nothing.
The meeting
Put it in the calendar, monthly at least, with the product and business people in the room together. Bring the real numbers.
Two questions:
- Are our experiments moving the metrics toward the target?
- If not, is that because the tuning is wrong, or because the direction is?
The reason to schedule it is that nobody ever feels ready. There is always one more experiment to run first, and the runway shrinks while you run it.
Vanity metrics. A team looking at a rising total can persevere for a very long time without ever seeing that the product is not improving. If the meeting is going to work, bring cohorts.
Pivot is not failure
A pivot keeps one leg planted. You hold on to what you validated and change what you did not. That is different from a restart, which throws away the learning too.
The cost of pivoting late is not just wasted runway. It is that the team gets attached, and each month of investment makes the change harder to propose.
The ten kinds
| Pivot | What changes |
|---|---|
| Zoom-in | One feature becomes the whole product |
| Zoom-out | The whole product becomes one feature of something bigger |
| Customer segment | The product is right, the customer is someone else |
| Customer need | The customer is right, the problem is a different one |
| Platform | An application becomes a platform, or the reverse |
| Business architecture | Switching between high margin with low volume, and low margin with high volume |
| Value capture | How you make money changes |
| Engine of growth | Switching between sticky, viral and paid |
| Channel | How the product reaches customers changes |
| Technology | Same problem, same customer, different way of solving it |
Zoom-in is the most common. A team builds six features, finds that customers only care about one, and rebuilds around it.
Customer segment meets the most resistance, because the value guess was partly right. The product works, just not for the people you had in mind.
"Should we pivot?" is a hard conversation. "Should we do a customer segment pivot, from small teams to solo users?" is a decision people can actually take a position on.
Put the next pivot-or-persevere meeting in the calendar now, with a date. If your team has never held one, that is the finding.