Product Pivot, a Breakfast Analogy

The term product pivot is something that I think has been interpreted quite wrongly by a lot of individuals who doesn’t understand lean and agile. Countless times I heard that being agile means being able to chop and change product in development in any given time, in the name of “pivot”. I think this is bad because this means that teams never really finish any products due to the change of directions every time.

You may think what does breakfast has to do with any of these? Well, this is it. This morning I woke up feeling hungry and I had the expectation of eating a good breakfast. The original plan was to make some toast with roast chicken (I had some in my fridge) and egg. However, when I got to the fridge, reality hit my sleepy brain and I saw that I didn’t have any eggs left nor any bread!

I had to pivot (ta-daaa). I looked around the kitchen and I found out that I had some instant noodle soup packet with roast chicken flavour. I then cook it up with the roast chicken I had in my fridge (sliced) and some cracked pepper. The result was a warm, tasty and fulfilling breakfast.

In the end I fulfilled my primary expectation of having good breakfast in the morning using a different dish.

This is pretty close to what a product pivot is. Just because there are some changes in the market or timeline or just someone having a good idea, doesn’t mean that a team should go 180 degree and drop whatever that they are doing to start something new. If I just gave up and drop the idea of getting some breakfast I might actually end up being hungry and grumpy.

Pivoting actually means (in basketball) stepping with one foot while keeing the other foot at its point of contact with the floor (from merriam-webster). In product talk this means changing how we can satisfy our customer without having a knee-jerk reaction and destroying the product strategy in the process. There are numerous lean and agile technique that can help achive this such as thinner slices, re-evaluating target persona, lean experimentations and so on.

I hope this short post helped you in getting some more idea what a product pivot is or even gave you idea on how to explain product pivot to someone who doesn’t understand.