1 Does pivoting mean you got it wrong?
Pivoting does not necessarily mean you got it wrong. Another way to think of pivoting is that it allows you to make improvements to your product. These improvements will depend on the information fed back to you by market research, by your customers and from observing your financial situation and how efficiently your operations work.
Feedback can inform you of what features and benefits are valuable and viable with customers versus those that are less popular and don’t add value. Perhaps most importantly feedback allows assumptions about customers to be tested. For example, through getting to know your customers better, you might establish that in fact the problem you thought you were solving is a different one. Through testing and learning, corrective action can be taken – i.e. the pivot.
One argument against the minimal viable product idea is that, by launching too early, your idea may be just too rough and ready for the vast majority of customers who prefer the glitch-free, smooth user experience of the polished, final iteration. But, as was said above, this really means being sure that you are adding value and not simply building in costs for features that are unsustainable.
An important consideration is whether changes allow you to balance quality, costs, prices and market positioning (e.g. how your product or service is perceived in relation to competitors’ brands or similar solutions) with your own capacity to meet demand. Clearly, if you cannot supply and sustain quality at scale, then you will have to reconfigure your business substantially or risk losing customers from failure to meet expectations. This may mean either seeking investment to grow your capacity or the recognition that you are a high-margin, low-volume business.
Introduction