The Two-Week Pivot

This is the third article in a ‘how to’ series for business model innovation. It aims to provide guidance and methodology to support you in pivoting your business model for sustainable growth, based on our experience of pivoting and developing new adjacent ventures over the past 14 years.

We’ve successfully pivoted our clients’ business models numerous times, applying tried-and-tested methodologies to help position them for future sustainable growth. We’ve helped take Philips into aquaculture (https://philips.to/2YAXGWf), EDF Energy into home management (https://bit.ly/2L24tA7) and BP Castrol into car aftercare (https://bit.ly/2YILq5Q).

We usually accomplish this with the (relative!) comfort of several weeks or months of effort, with good time to get a grasp of the market and consumer dynamics, to build out the proposition and go-to-market strategy, and most importantly, to validate the proposed pivot with target customers and develop a bullet-proof business case.

However, with businesses facing unprecedented financial difficulties there just isn’t the desire for such comprehensive exercise, yet the need to pivot is stronger than ever. With this in mind, we thought we’d share how we recently ran a very successful pivoting sprint for a long-standing client and highlight some of the lessons learnt. In two week we had helped them identify and validate a commercially attractive business model pivot, with a high-level GTM strategy, financial case and execution plan for them to take forward at pace.

The Two-Week Sprint Process:

1. Pivot Preparation (3 days)

With only a couple of days to prepare for the opportunities workshop, comprehensive research is out of the question. We quickly brought together insight from a multitude of sources, roughly collating into slides with little thought given to structure or potential implications at this stage — it is stimulus after all! We launched a quick online survey to gather wider internal perspectives, conducted a few informal conversations with friendly customers to understand how their behaviours and needs had changed, and dug up adjacent industry business model insight gleaned from our other projects. We supplemented this with some quick research into the competition and how they are responding to the crisis. There are an increasing number of thought pieces regarding the likely persistent changes resulting from Covid that can also be repurposed into appropriate stimulus.

The stimulus pack was sent out to participants in advance of the workshop with instructions to review and capture first thoughts on potential pivot opportunities. It is important that there is a good representative cross-section of participants from across the business invited to the workshop, but not more than c. 10–15 to make the session manageable.

2. Pivot Hypotheses (2 days including ½ day virtual workshop)

We ran the workshop using MURAL, an online collaborative whiteboard (or Miro is another good tool). Participants were asked to share their top-line ideas by adding sticky notes to the virtual board. These notes were clustered into common opportunity themes by the whole group, using smaller virtual breakout groups to build out basic business model canvases for each emerging theme. These were played back to the group, with the facilitators capturing any builds, gaps or questions for later. Participants were asked to fill out a virtual assessment board based on pre-agreed criteria to prioritise the long-list of opportunities and select two to progress. We split the group in half to build the two priority themes to the next level of detail utilisiing full business model canvas templates. Post workshop we took the draft templates and further developed them over the next day, filling gaps with further desk research or internal conversations. We also planned the following week’s testing plan and scheduled a number of conversations with potential customers to help refine and validate the proposition and critical assumptions underpinning each. (A critical assumption is something that has to be true for a potential pivot to be economically viable, e.g. price point of x, customer conversion of y, etc)

3. Pivot Proposition (3 days)

We spent the next three (long) days working from sketches into basic proto-types, iterating with a number of friendly customers in 1-on-1 online depth sessions, combining this with a digital customer panel to allow more ad-hoc testing of features and user journey. The 3-day sprint comprised the following testing focus:

Day 1 — Basic concepts, high-level features, benefits (select final opportunity)

Day 2 — Feature set, barriers to use, UX considerations

Day 3 — E2E journey, business model and critical assumptions

In parallel we spent time building out the other details of the proposition, including straw-man hypotheses of the operating model, go-to-market strategy and capability requirements (internal vs. potential partner provision).

4. Pivot Execution (2 days)

The focus for the remaining 2 days was to bring all the loose ends together into very concise 10-slide business case including a high-level financial model (more focus on revenue opportunity than cost at this stage). We conducted a final online working session to finalise the main aspects of the business case, capturing participant builds and questions to incorporate into final revisions. The session was also used to develop a high-level development and implementation plan.

Lessons Learned:

1. As an innovation consultant this was a unique opportunity to fast track a project that usually requires much more diligence, development and validation. However, the outputs are surprisingly good and in the current climate, with reduced governance requirements, are more than sufficient for investment decision-making. I hope more clients use this opportunity to fast track a sustainable response to the Covid-19 crisis
2. It was our first time using an online collaboration tool, which turned out to be surprisingly effective, but it does significantly change the dynamic of the session. People are adding in content all the time and not necessarily waiting for a designated exercise. This is a good and bad thing!
3. Such an endeavour is not good for the home/work separation as we are compressing a much longer process into two weeks, running multiple activities in parallel. It does require significant engagement, input and work from participants throughout the two weeks, especially true of the evenings post workshop through to the end of testing.

Should you require any more information on the 2 week pivot, please contact stephen.deadmon@sia-partners.com