When "Pivoting" Is Just Bad Product Discipline in Disguise
We've all heard it: "Startups pivot. It's normal. It's expected."
And it's true—the best startups learn fast, adjust course, and find product-market fit through iteration. But lately, I've been thinking about how often that phrase gets used to justify something else entirely: a complete lack of product strategy.
There's a specific pattern I keep seeing. A startup builds a product. That product is ready to sell. But instead of selling it, the team customizes it for a specific client—often a client who doesn't actually need those customizations. Then they do it again. And again. Each time, leadership calls it "pivoting" or "being customer-centric" or "staying flexible."
That's not pivoting. That's bad product discipline.
The Difference Matters
Strategic pivoting happens when you learn something fundamental about your market and adjust your direction based on that insight. You're testing a thesis, gathering data, and making intentional decisions about where to focus your limited resources.
What I'm describing is different. It's when:
You customize your product for individual clients who could use what you already built
Each "pivot" is actually just a feature request from the loudest voice in the room
You haven't given your current direction enough time to prove or disprove itself
Engineering is constantly context-switching between disconnected features
No one can clearly articulate what you're learning or why you're making these changes
The Hidden Costs
This pattern creates real damage. You're building expensive one-off solutions instead of a scalable product. You're training your sales team to sell custom work instead of your actual offering. You're accumulating technical debt that will slow down everything you do next. And you're making your business fundamentally less valuable to investors who want to see scalable, repeatable revenue.
The cruel irony? This often happens because of revenue pressure. The team feels they need to close any deal they can. But by saying yes to everything, they end up with a product that's harder to sell, harder to support, and less differentiated in the market.
What to Ask Instead
When someone proposes customizing your product for a specific opportunity, try asking:
What client need does this solve that our existing product doesn't?
How many other potential clients have this same need?
What's the opportunity cost of the engineering time this requires?
Are we turning away prospects who would buy what we already have?
These questions aren't about being inflexible or customer-hostile. They're about being honest about whether you're making strategic decisions or just reacting to whatever opportunity is in front of you.
The Real Work
Building product discipline in a startup is hard, especially when you're trying to keep the lights on. Sales feels pressure to close deals. Leadership feels pressure to show traction. Everyone wants to be responsive to customers.
But saying no to the wrong opportunities is just as important as saying yes to the right ones. Your job as a product leader isn't to build everything everyone asks for. It's to build something that enough people want that you can sustain and grow a business around it.
That requires strategy, not just motion. And no amount of calling it "pivoting" will change that.
