What happens when your pivot goes horribly wrong?

http://skift.com/2012/11/23/what-happens-when-your-pivot-goes-horribly-wrong/

by danso • 14 years ago

30 19 14 years ago

neotek• 14 years ago

I wonder how much testing they did before releasing this. As developers we often have a blindness to the way users see things compared to how we see them, especially if we're in love with our ideas.

shimsham3• 14 years ago

Agreed. As developers we should also avoid turning everything into another Bill and Ted adventure. Awesome!

jeremyjh• 14 years ago

"in the coming weeks" doesn't soon enough to save their business. Couldn't they just revert to their previous version in the apple store since it is already approved?

clarky07• 14 years ago

If only. There is no option to revert. The best they can do is submit an update and hope to get an expedited review approved. Generally Apple says no when you reason I made a dumb update.

billirvine3• 14 years ago

I blame the insane culture springing up around inaccurate and ill-conceived interpretations of the lean startup methodology. Many young entrepreneurs and early-stage startups seem entrenched in a mindset that they must be pivoting or iterating or using all their runway or sumsuch similar nonsense.

The word "pivot" should be banned from tech startup lexicon.

shimsham3• 14 years ago

You beat me to it. Ditto. Perhaps I should've pivoted my reply! Yes, that was just as meaningless.

billirvine3• 14 years ago

Next time, you can be first.

I've long had "issues" with the madness that tech startup culture inspires. MVP should be IVP, where as IPV = Initial Viable Product. If one really learns "lean" methodology, MVP really is IVP, but no one seems willing to actually pause and learn. Sad.

Shank• 14 years ago

If this was a change that warranted a drastic switch in a different direction, why didn't they ask the existing user base for feedback? Judging by how vocal this group is, they'd have easily figured out that this wasn't the right move.

Even if that user base didn't care for the change, they could have just released a new app with the new feature set.

rhizome3• 14 years ago

Well, people are loudest when things go wrong. The thing is though, evidently it wasn't actually a pivot, but a complete retool/redesign. Perhaps they didn't realize that you can add features without removing others. Perhaps they got bad advice.

elchief• 14 years ago

I'm sorry but I don't know what pivot means here.

I can upgrade and downgrade an html5 app (in phonegap) more easily can't I? Just update code on server.

Apple doesn't let you do a/b testing?

This seems to be a case of the product manager having no clue what his customers use in the product.

rhizome3• 14 years ago

Yeah, I don't know why they didn't just roll it back.

bdcravens• 14 years ago

Typically you won't have your app's UI on your server in a PhoneGap app. You'll include the UI in the app, and what's on the server is data services. It's not that you can't do what you described, but if your app is little more than a browser, you increase the odds of being rejected.

pedalpete• 14 years ago

First off, this isn't a pivot. They're expanding their service. A pivot is moving in a new and different direction.

Secondly, they are not the first company to make a misstep, and if most of the comments are regarding the ability to search by airport name, that is a fairly minor issue to resolve I'd hope. Particularly if they had the feature previously, the back-end might still be there and they'll just need to update the UI.

This isn't 'horribly wrong', decisions need to be made, they just made the wrong one. I doubt this is sinking the ship.

billirvine3• 14 years ago

> First off, this isn't a pivot. They're expanding their service

Apparently the users felt differently. From the feedback and reviews, the users saw a different direction -- not an expansion.

rhizome3• 14 years ago

It's not "expanding their service" when they remove the functionality that was central to the previous version of the app.

peloton• 14 years ago

Interesting to see the similarities with this situation and the one bitly faced a few months back: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/29/bitly-update-user-reaction/

It seems like the response will be quite different, which will make this comparison a lot more interesting.

saosebastiao• 14 years ago

I'll let the rest of the comments talk about how this isn't a pivot. I'm more concerned that entrepreneurs are worried about pivoting at all. It is almost as if they are planning pivots in advance. How fucking stupid can you get? Sure, successful startups do it...but they do it because find out they are going in the wrong direction...not because the act of executing a pivot makes you successful.

johnrgrace• 14 years ago

If you have money in the bank and still believe, you pivot again.

If you don't have money you either get some, sellout, or die.

What happens when your pivot goes horribly wrong?

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