Recognizing When It’s Time to Pivot.
This week’s topic: Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Understanding when to pivot can save you from stress in the long run.
Have you ever devoted your blood, sweat, and tears to a project only to have to walk away from it because it was a failure?
Struggles can teach us a lot. But knowing when to take what you’ve learned and make a change is just as important.
This week, I’m reflecting on past failures and how learning to understand when to pivot can be crucial to happiness.
The Power of Persistence and Iteration
One of my favorite features, which I worked on in the past, had the type of struggles that any startup could go through—especially if you’re the type of team that builds tech as if you’re a startup in a big (and highly political) company.
The TLDR of this feature - we built a landing page that leveraged our main product, a highly customized chatbot, to allow an end user to shape their own journey.
So, what was the biggest challenge?
Our landing page was a direct competitor to our standard landing pages, which our Marketing team had used in a highly successful way for years. Marketing held the keys to the pages and was not a fan of other teams crimping their style.
Working through several iterations and investing in a ton of external user testing, our highly competitive nature saw the last couple of A/B tests with our version of the page outperforming the champion.
We “won”.
What was my takeaway from these struggles?
Persistence and a commitment to iteration can transform a struggling project into a successful one.
Our page became a strong performer because we kept refining it based on feedback and data.
Our ticker tape parade, however, was way shorter-lived than we had anticipated.
Recognizing When It’s Time to Pivot
Sometimes, success in one area doesn't translate to overall project viability.
Despite our landing page’s success in A/B tests and improved performance metrics, we encountered persistent political resistance from the Marketing team.
Even though we had designed and developed this product in a unique way compared to how other product development was happening in the company, we continued to run into that “It’s not quite good enough” wall time and time again.
We collectively realized that the lack of alignment meant further investment in the project might not best use our time and energy.
The takeaway here:
As your project progresses, look for signs like ongoing conflicts, lack of support, or barriers to progress.
Even a successful project might need to pivot if it faces insurmountable challenges.
Making the Pivot
Pivoting means using your lessons to find a new path.
Realizing that the political environment was too challenging, we shifted our focus away from the landing page.
We redirected our efforts to enhance the chatbot’s features, improving customer experience and engagement.
Completing the pivot and getting motivated again after a failure can be pretty tricky. My motivation to get it going again took a significant hit for a short period.
But the strength of the team can help the cause here.
Working through this project, everyone had become so close that we were able to pick each other up and move on to the next challenge.
As you pivot, the most crucial part is to think about and understand how your new skills and experiences can help you move forward in your new direction.
Final Thoughts
Struggles are learning moments. Use them to recognize when it’s time to pivot and start fresh.
Embrace change and use your hard-earned lessons to guide you to a new beginning.
Our experience with the chatbot project taught us the importance of knowing when to pivot and focus on what would deliver the best results for our customers and team.
Thanks for reading Product Party.
Drop me a message, and let’s talk about product things.
Great tips!
For me it was very difficult to pivot due to the "sunken cost".
A pivot is also a way to acknowledge yourself that you actually failed to some extent. Or otherwise you'd have chosen the "better" road in advance. Everyone fails sometimes, especially entrepreneurs, and it's best to acknowledge it as fast a possible.