It is really hard. As a matter of fact, "pivoting" is a bit too easy a word to use. Kind of like when "shell shock" was replaced by "battle fatigue".
A pivot is typically a center point, such as a pin or pole, on which something anchored to it can rotate. This is pretty easy if you're a pin or a pole, as you were probably constructed with this type of operation in mind beforehand.
Teams are not constructed with this capability in mind. We optimize based on current plans, not on potential future plans. As such, the only real pin in a team's pivot capability is their mental capacity to switch off plan A and go to plan B.
This is hard to do, consciously or otherwise. Most people need the time to wind down, process their thoughts to understand why the idea they've been working on is no longer feasible. This is a big mental leap, even for the most prepared. Some struggle for a while. Some never get there. One thing's for sure -- it rarely if ever shifts simultaneously for everyone on a team.
Pivoting is the other shoe that drops as a result of "failing faster". Indeed, it's a necessary tactic if one wishes to stay in business. But, because of the makeup of teams and original plans, efforts to pivot seems to fail more often than not.
Teams aren't constructed to pivot, but that's kind of the point of Lean Startup. You should ideally be able to validate an idea with a skeleton crew (or an individual). The bigger the team necessary to validate the issue (some problems are BIG, and require big teams), the more difficult it is to pivot. The primary goal of a startup is to learn, so the team should only be big enough to learn more about the problem area, and learn about the means to an appropriate solution. Teams built to compete will have more trouble than teams built to learn.
It's an interesting post, because there are probably two types of 'pivots':
1) Change the solution to the problem you're solving
2) Change the problem you're solving
(1) is a lot easier than (2).
I think the key here is to love the problem you're solving - if you've chosen a big enough problem (or important enough), then there should always be a market for a solution... don't get discouraged when the particular solution you tried doesn't work... you just need to find a new one that will.
If you're truly pivoting, and not just giving up and changing plans, then one would imagine that you can latch onto the common thread between the old and new direction as a means of motivating the team. If you're building a new product towards the same vision, focus on the vision, if you're re-using technology built but towards a different vision, focus on the technology.
This is one of the reasons to keep the team as small as possible and invest as little effort as possible in your idea to validate it. The less you have invested, the less you have to throw away when it turns out the idea wasn't so great in the first place, and the easier it'll be to make that mental context switch.
Sometimes pivoting is easy, because you've been struggling with a crappy product, everyone knows you need to change something, and you're getting an incredible response for a landing page you threw up on a whim over the weekend. So pivot - easy call.
Sometimes pivoting is hard, because you're making some money, employees are happy, but you're convinced that in six months your market segment won't exist any more.
Changing the product is not necessarily changing the vision. Read the article you referenced... IMVU changed the direction of their product drastically from IM to social networking while still adhering to the vision of avatar mediated communication.
This view on pivoting reflects the Groupon pivot fallacy where you just dramatically change your business model and, poof, you're a billionaire.
What we've found to be a more tolerable, easy-to-execute view on pivoting is to say, we know what general problem we're focused on solving, but we don't know exactly how to solve it.
Pivots are therefore continual and small. We probe in various directions hypothesizing that a certain approach might help us make headway. Among other things, lowering the stakes and testing in small, bite-sized pieces will make it much easier to sell a new idea to your team.
This is exactly the problem that makes the Lean Startup so interesting and radical. Everything we think we know about business has ingrained in us a sense of change equating to failure. We build up inflated expectations for our non-existant products and business models to employees, to investors, to friends and family, all the while ignoring the fact that all the assumptions on which we've based our businesses are just that, guesses. Then, when one or more of the assumptions is invalidated, we're so embarrassed about being wrong that we try to persevere even when we know we're on the wrong track, and then run full speed into the wall instead of changing course.
Eric Ries has some really insightful ideas about how to turn these problems around, and if you haven't already read The Lean startup I highly recommend it.
the difficulty of the pivot is entirely defined by the pivot angle and progression of the project. for moderate progression, angles < 90deg. are not so bad, most of your vision remains aligned. > 90deg. is very hard and >135deg. - abandon ship!
we just finished a drawn-out consumer-centric to provider-centric pivot of maybe 30deg. with the project was already at at 75% completion but we felt very little pain because the core value model did not change, we just shifted gears, reworked a few features and here we are, 30 days before public beta. we have fairly little investment as well - approx 250k and a team of 6.
if your core value targets a very narrow market, you are more susceptible to these difficulties.
If there's no product, then are you really pivoting? To me, pivoting implies that you have a product and are moving away from it because it's not the best avenue of attack for the problem you're trying to solve. In other words, you've tried an approach (i.e. developed a product), it hasn't worked, and now you're trying something different.
I'm in the middle of a pivot. I think that the difficulties described in this article, while totally possible, are more a result of doing it backwards. Before we pivoted, my co-founder and I had very long discussions. As we brought our employee aboard, we made her aware of the pivot. IF we had external investors, they would be aware of the need to pivot at least as early as us (in fact one of the arguments for external investors is that they'd hopefully have made us aware of it earlier... I wish we'd pivoted a year ago.)
I'm sure the larger your company is, and the more staff you have and the more money you've taken the harder it is to pivot.
I think the lean startup methodology and pivoting itself, is more focused on a way of doing things before you get all that.
Keep things really small and nimble and don't spend years on something before pivoting. OF course this is useless advice to someone whose spent years on something that looked good and now needs to pivot. But I think that this is an indication that they weren't ready to pivot more when it was easier.
In fact, isn't the whole goal to pivot when you're small and its cheap, and easy?
So, I think the lesson learned here is to be really focused on the metrics & nature of your business so that you know really whether you've got a viable business before you hire people, raise money and get a lot of emotional and other investment in that business you need to pivot away from.
Maybe the lesson is not that Pivoting is hard, but Pivot Early, Pivot Often.
(Not sure about that. Doing my first real pivot here as we speak.)
I don't deny the momentum.... in fact, the momentum of the old product is such a pull, even though everyone's fully committed to the pivot... its a distraction at best and at worst, we spend some work maintaining that product (which is where our funding is coming from now) that could be better spent on the product we're pivoting into.
Just some thoughts, apologies if they're a bit all over the place. Pivoting is hard, I don't deny, pivoting early and often, I think, is the approach that will make it easier, and make pivoting later, when its hard, less needed.
A pivot is typically a center point, such as a pin or pole, on which something anchored to it can rotate. This is pretty easy if you're a pin or a pole, as you were probably constructed with this type of operation in mind beforehand.
Teams are not constructed with this capability in mind. We optimize based on current plans, not on potential future plans. As such, the only real pin in a team's pivot capability is their mental capacity to switch off plan A and go to plan B.
This is hard to do, consciously or otherwise. Most people need the time to wind down, process their thoughts to understand why the idea they've been working on is no longer feasible. This is a big mental leap, even for the most prepared. Some struggle for a while. Some never get there. One thing's for sure -- it rarely if ever shifts simultaneously for everyone on a team.
Pivoting is the other shoe that drops as a result of "failing faster". Indeed, it's a necessary tactic if one wishes to stay in business. But, because of the makeup of teams and original plans, efforts to pivot seems to fail more often than not.