My team at Kromatic and I originally published this post here on Grasshopper Herder, our lean startup blog. Kromatic’s mission is to help companies get to market fast and reduce the cost of innovation. Subscribe to our newsletter or speak to one of our coaches to see if we can help you reach your innovation goals.
(Warning: This post may be highly theoretical / geeky. If you’re looking for the more amusing Taxonomy of the Lean Startup Anti-Pivot, it’s here.)
Last week we were planning for the worst. Having gone through 51 iterations of a mockup and gathered as much as feedback as wecould with our primitive alpha, we feel confident about our basic customer problem hypothesis. Still, we play a lot of chess and like to think at least five moves ahead in the five most likely futures. So we decided to make a list of my potential pivots.
(Note: For those not familiar with the term, pivot is a lean startup vocab word that states in it’s simplest form: If your business model isn’t working, change something. More on this below.)
To do this, we started making a list of questions we could ask of our product/market to brainstorm other ideas. In the process, we wound up breaking up the list of pivots into categories based on the questions and posted the list to the lean startup google group. We were wondering, “is anyone else doing this? Is there any established taxonomy for pivoting or any template? Are there other questions I should be asking?”
Here was our original list of questions and their associated pivots:
Product Pivots:
– Can we solve the problems of our target market with an partly or
entirely different product?
Use Case Pivots:
– Can we use the same tech for a different use case with the same
target market?
Market Pivots:
– Can we apply the same product / tech to a different market?
Narrowing stance:
– Can we narrow our focus to a smaller/niche market or use case?
Widening stance:
– Can our product embrace a wider market or use case?
We thought this list could be the start of a very rudimentary taxonomy of pivots. However, some of the responses we’ve received so far have tested our understanding of the basic pivot concept and made us realize we had tied the concept of pivot into “product / market fit.” As product / market fit is most basic hypothesis we need to confirm before knowing that we have a viable business, any business changes outside of product/market fit didn’t register as a pivot for us.
Expect the Unexpected
Others seem to have a different take on the term, including Brant Cooper who implied “Everything about your business is a potential pivot” and also Eric Ries who suggested the following types of pivots:
- “Customer need pivot: same customer segment, different need/problem
- Customer segment pivot: same problem, different segment
- Business architecture pivot: i.e. from enterprise to consumer
- Zoom-in feature pivot: remove features to focus on just one key feature
- Zoom-out feature pivot: add features to become more of a holistic solution
- Technology pivot: solve same problem but with different technology stack
- Channel pivot: same problem, same solution, different path to customers
- Platform pivot: open up an application to third-parties to become a platform (or vice-versa)”
(emphasis ours)
You’ll note that Eric’s list and Brant’s response both imply or include changes which don’t necessarily apply to product/market fit. In Eric’s list, we’re looking mostly at “technology pivot” and “channel pivot” which have nothing to do with who you target with what product, but instead focuses on how to make the product.
There is a lot of overlap between Eric’s list and ours and some of his terms are a lot zingier. But for our current purpose of achieving product/market fit we need something combining both elements, so we merged them:
(Please note: We don’t recommend taking our list over his, especially if you plan on speaking the same language as the rest of the lean startup gurus.)
Product Pivots:
– Can we solve the problems of our target market with an partly or entirely different product?
This one doesn’t seem to have a parallel in Eric’s list, which we found surprising. We’re keeping it in ours because we think it’s very relevant.
Use Case Pivots:
– Can we use the same tech for a different use case with the same target market?
This is “Customer Need” in Eric’s list.
Market Pivots:
– Can we apply the same product / tech to a different market?
We would group “Customer segment”, “Business architecture”, and “Platform pivot” under this. All of them refer to who you’re selling the product to. We would consider all of this under the broad category of Market although it’s useful to break it down further for brainstorming.
Zoom Pivots:
– Can we narrow our focus to a smaller/niche market or use case?
– Can our product embrace a wider market or use case?
This is a great term from Eric and is better than our “Narrowing / Widening Stance” term. The main difference is that Eric’s refers only to product features and we would also want to address the possibility of widening or narrowing the target market. (Although you could just as easily call those Market Pivots.)
Open Ended Answer
You may also note that in the list above we ditched Eric’s suggested categories of “channel” and “technology” pivot as they don’t help us with product / market fit, but rather refer to marketing and production techniques. That’s not to say they’re not valuable, just they’re not relevant to the problem we’re trying to focus on right now.
As such, we have no firm conclusion to this post. We started the taxonomy as a thought exercise and we’re continuing in that spirit. We realize we may be using the term pivot differently than the lean startup folk and we need to adapt our terminology. Speaking our own language is not particularly useful for communication purposes, although we do find it helpful to associate the term pivot with the product/market fit concept. Otherwise pivoting can be applied to everything and is synonymous with the word “change”.
That’s it for the geeky post. Next week we’ll try and share some of our user behavior maps.
My team at Kromatic and I originally published this post here on Grasshopper Herder, our lean startup blog. Kromatic’s mission is to help companies get to market fast and reduce the cost of innovation. Subscribe to our newsletter or speak to one of our coaches to see if we can help you reach your innovation goals.
