What you set out to do may not be what you end up doing
A lot have been said about the concept of pivoting a product concept because of all the surrounding buzz around Eric Ries' lean startup movement.
Flickr
Flickr is a text-book example of successful pivoting.
Caterina Fake knew she was on to something when one of her engineers in her web-based game (massively multi player online game Game Neverending) showed her a cool functionality to share photos and save them into a web page. Deciding that they should release it as a new project "Flickr", the application gained traction rapidly. Apparently, the presumedly solved problem of photo sharing is still pretty much in demand.
Early versions of the Flickr focused on a multiuser chat functionality called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities.
In fact, some key and popular features of Flickr (such as tagging, favoriting, group photo pools) were not even present in the first iteration.
It's a text-book story of how pivoting resulted in a hugely successful photosharing website, with each pivot throwing out massive amounts of work. even chopping years worth of sunk costs practically overnight.
Category: Product Management
Leave a Comment :
Leave a Comment