Pivot: a crucial strategic move

With the extraordinary adoption of "lean" or "agile" methods in the field of start-up foundation and development founders and leaders of more established businesses come across the concept of "pivot". The term has a more positive flavor to it than "restructuring of the business model" or "change of strategy", both of which it is in fact. But, the concept of pivot is not always very clear and we sometimes come across teams that fail to understand how critical the timing and management of a pivot move is; in execution the most challenging aspects are often:

1. the alignment of internal resources to the new model
2. communication with the market
3. transition to the new model in terms of customer retention, service continuity and discontinuity, operational interfaces with established ecosystems

When we are dealing with such transitions in larger organizations the pivot is less of a pivot and more of a tectonic shift with a completely different magnitude of challenge when it comes to managing change, training people, hiring, firing, reorganizing processes, changing tools and methods... etc.
In this post, you'll find a good presentation about pivot, while in future posts we'll give you:

1. an example of a botched pivot move at GetGlue, now tvtag
2. an account from the field in an established company that needed to re-invent itself

Lean startup - what is pivot from Yuki Sekiguchi