AI marketer. Omar
Metrics have stalled, and the team keeps tweaking the product with small improvements to no avail. That's usually when the word “pivot” comes up.
Level: for beginners
Language: Russian
Duration: 2:53
Metrics have stalled, and the team keeps tweaking the product with small improvements to no avail. That's usually when the word “pivot” comes up. Let's look at what it really means.
A pivot is not “drop everything and start from scratch.” It is a change in one key hypothesis about the business while keeping all the rest of the accumulated knowledge: for example, the customer segment, the monetization model or the sales channel changes, but the team, the product and the experience remain.
How do you know it's time? You should keep going in the same direction if the team has specific ideas about what to improve, if user retention is growing, even slowly, if users themselves are actively using the product and asking for it to evolve, and if the team still genuinely believes in the chosen direction. But you need to pivot when you have run out of ideas, retention won't budge after several honest attempts to improve it, features are added at random just for the sake of doing something, and working on the product turns into a burdensome chore rather than something you find interesting.
Let's look at a real example. UiPath, today the global leader in robotic process automation (RPA), started out in 2005 in Bucharest under the name DeskOver. Its founders, Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă, spent almost ten years doing outsourcing and developing automation libraries for other companies such as IBM and Microsoft. In essence, they were a contractor rather than a product company. Dines himself later admitted that their first mistake was trying to build a startup while doing consulting and outsourcing at the same time: it spread their efforts thin and kept them from finding a product of their own.
The turning point came in 2012: the ten-person team noticed growing demand specifically for automating routine office processes and decided to shift all its resources to building a separate platform for this niche. In 2013, the first product in the UiPath Desktop Automation line was released, and in 2015 the company officially changed its name from DeskOver to UiPath, at the same time as it raised its first outside funding. Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, discussing this story with Dines, calls this decision a “crucible moment”: refocusing the company entirely on RPA and abandoning the old model. After this pivot, UiPath became the fastest-growing SaaS company in history at the time and eventually made it to an IPO.
It's important to understand the difference in scale: companies make small pivots (minor course corrections) all the time, and this is a normal part of the work. But truly major, fateful pivots like UiPath's happen much less often. Yet if a company wants to grow into something truly big, it will almost certainly have to go through such a moment at least once.
A pivot is not a defeat. It is an acknowledgment that the original hypothesis about the product turned out to be not quite right, and that the team had enough data and courage to see this and change course.
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