

Pivots are a Trap - canterburry
http://blog.thirdyearmba.com/pivots-kill

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DanielRibeiro
Interesting. The author quotes Pincus:

 _One thing I learned is that while your vision should never change, you
should keep trying different strategies until one works_

And yet, the definition of a pivot, as given by the person that made the term
widespread is very similar[1]:

 _A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision_

And the author, at the end seems to actually agree with it:

 _But it's important to realize that taking different bites of the same apple
is very different from biting into an entirely new pear or banana, and it
seems like a lot of people are actually doing that_

So I guess he is actually warning against one _interpretation_ of a pivot,
that is change in vision.

[1] [http://www.marywisemandesign.com/pivot-change-the-
strategy-n...](http://www.marywisemandesign.com/pivot-change-the-strategy-not-
the-vision/)

~~~
cwp
The word "pivot" is like "refactoring." It's so overused that it's mostly
misused, and you can't rely on its meaning any more.

~~~
crazygringo
I'm curious, how is "refactoring" overused or misused?

To me, it's about cleaning up code in order to make it better-architected and
(often) smaller, so there are less opportunities for bugs, and it is more
extensible. Are there other uses I'm unaware of?

~~~
gfodor
The traditional definition of refactoring is making well-understood,
deterministic transformation of code from one state to another in a way that
provably has no effects on the behavior. For example, Extract Method or Inline
Variable are refactorings that can be automated by your IDE and by definition
will not break anything.

Nowadays people seem to use "refactoring" to mean "changing code without
adding new front-facing features." This is bad as it causes large, scary
changes to fall into the realm of "refactoring." Refactoring, if you want to
live by its original definition, should be a relatively mindless, safe series
of small well understood steps.

~~~
crazygringo
Interesting. So, taking a widget with CSS styling full of negative margins and
redundant <div>'s and "!important"'s and font-sizes which overwrite each other
five times... And cleaning it up so that each element and rule does exactly
what it should be designed to do, in 1/5 of the number of CSS rules, and is
now easily added to, but looks exactly the same in the end...

If that's not called refactoring, what is it supposed to be called? I would
hate to use terms like "cleaning up code" or "improving code" because they're
so horribly vague (they could be about merely changing tabs to spaces, or
include adding whole new features).

Suggestions?

~~~
gfodor
Honestly in that example I think you're probably safely within the classic
definition, since its just a gap in tooling that makes it you can't make those
types of transformations automatically in baby steps.

Here's an example of someone using it wrong: "We are going to refactor the API
call to have 5 parameters instead of 4." The word they are looking for here is
"change" or "extend", and they're falling back on "refactor" since they think
it makes them sound smarter.

~~~
crazygringo
OK, now I get how people misuse it, I totally agree :)

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hanibash
Our startup, bloc (www.bloc.io), pivoted four times in 8 months, and we're way
happy with where we are now.

The vision, or core motivation, never did change though. There's a common
thread through all four pivots. In fact the current product looks most similar
to the very first. But it's different in important ways that weren't known
during pivot 1.

Here's the full story [http://jmtame.posterous.com/this-is-how-you-actually-
teach-p...](http://jmtame.posterous.com/this-is-how-you-actually-teach-people-
to-prog)

~~~
dlevine
I think Jared is a smart guy and I respect him a lot. However, I think that
both Niroka and Officehours.TV could have eventually worked out in some form
(they both seemed like credible products when they came out). I think that the
key missing ingredient was probably time and some iteration in the solution
space (rather than an entirely new product). With that said, I'm glad that you
guys found something that worked for you.

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emmett
Speaking of a cofounder of Justin.tv, I'm not sure what you'd call TwitchTV
other than a pivot and it seems to be working out well.

SocialCam as well. Definitely a pivot for us.

~~~
RegEx
TwitchTV is a rebranding. Hell, you guys still use the Justin.tv domain for
payment. By far the biggest audience on JustinTV were those interested in
watching games, so you honed in on that. What's the difference between
JustinTV and TwitchTV besides UI/visuals?

~~~
emmett
"A live video platform for the whole web" vs. "a social video layer for video
games" are very different visions.

The most obvious difference? We have a partner program to help encourage an
ecosystem of professional casters and players to form. We never would have
built that for Justin.tv.

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colevscode
I agree with the spirit of this article. After having changed focus 3 times in
the last year I realized that I wasn't giving each project enough time to
develop. There were other good reasons for shifting direction, but lack of
traction shouldn't have been a factor.

I believe that a common reason for changing direction early is that founders
learn a lot about their problem in the first three months. Sometimes they
learn that it's the wrong problem for them to tackle. It could still be a
great business, but not a good fit for the founders. Prior research can reduce
the chance of a "gotcha," but often you must interact with customers to really
understand the problem. Yeah, customer dev techniques can speed this up, but
it's a process that takes time regardless.

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raverbashing
I think any story on Pivots deserve to have the story of the Fab Pivot

<http://www.slideshare.net/fabulis/fab-2011-timeline>

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EREFUNDO
For our start-up we made a major pivot but it complements the original concept
and even expanded it. If a pivot requires significant change in direction and
scrapping major elements of your original idea then one really has to think
hard before taking the next step.

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CesareBorgia
I was kind of hoping that this was a story about employees of Pivotal (Pivots)
causing trouble.

~~~
canterburry
...and why do you want employees of Pivotal to be causing troubles?

