Pivot, but without breaking your couch!

Do you remember this scene from Friends where Ross kept yelling others "pivot" until Chandler shouts repeatedly for him to "shut up"? The couch eventually gets stuck and breaks in half 😂. It was quite a famous and funny scene. Obviously, it was just a TV serial, but we have seen this story played in real life in a lot of companies. How many established firms out there, who want to disrupt their industry by creating a digital product, end up spending millions developing and launching the product only to realize that it fails to generate the expected traction and revenue. Companies either stop the project or need to change the business model if they don't want to lose all of their investment in the project. This realization to change the business model is often called the pivot. Pivoting is not bad though, but rather something that the majority of new ventures go through. This article explores a different methodology that can help reach the pivot without already investing millions.

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in their face" - Mike Tyson

There is a new methodology in town, and it is creating a lot of buzz. Well, not so new, already almost 10 years old 😜. It is called lean startup. I am sure a lot of you have heard of this buzzword, but for people who might not be too familiar with it, lean startup is a methodology that aims to reduce product development time and discover rapidly if the proposed business hypothesis is viable [1]. Lean startup together with rapid prototyping is making it possible for companies to bring their new and viable products to the market quicker than ever before. Despite the word "startup" in its name, large and established companies can really harness this methodology for long-term payoffs. So, how is lean startup different from any other methodologies to build products?

Usually, when a company decides to build a new product, they start by creating a sound business plan. It normally takes months of planning and research to create the plan. A team is then assembled and they start to build the product for the next couple of months or years. Along the way, they might incorporate some feedback from their users and then in the end do a big launch of the product. In contrast, the Lean Startup does not try to find the perfect business plan, but rather tries to find out which plans do not work by rapid prototyping [2]. People who do the lean startup begin with several hypotheses, which they test by getting "out of the office and testing the prototypes with customers". Usually, testing is done with rapid no-code prototypes, which can be built in a matter of hours. There are a lot of tools out there that can help build a no-code prototype for a range of applications. Every feedback and iteration cycle lasts anything from a few hours to a few days. The priority here is speed. If the team realizes that the idea is not working, they then pivot to a different one and continue the testing. The testing continues until the product market fit has been reached, and it is ascertained that a particular custom group is willing to pay for the product. Only now, the product development with writing codes starts, ideally using agile methodology.

In today’s world, the pace of change in the business and technology landscape is accelerating. And increasingly companies are finding themselves asking questions about whether their business models are still relevant and whether their industry is in danger of being disrupted. These changes are the result of the product cycles getting shorter, and products being updated on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Social media, cloud computing, big data, and other internet trends are opening more innovative channels for companies. These technological advancements are forcing accelerated changes in the industry landscape. Fortunately, lean startup and rapid prototyping have come just in time to help managers deal with this fast-changing technological landscape. Its adoption has already started by not only startups but also big corporations [2] and is beginning to impact the speed with which the products are brought to the market.