What's the biggest pivot you’ve made while building your product?
Violetta Chernobuk
6 replies
What’s the biggest pivot you’ve made, and how did it change your product? Describe what drove you decision to pivot and the outcomes you saw afterward.
Replies
Ben Syverson@bensyverson
Mattebox
My photo & video app Mattebox started off as a camera app, with a few editing features. With my latest version, I pivoted to focus entirely on editing!
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Planyway
One of the biggest pivots I’ve made was shifting from a feature-driven product to a user-centric solution. Initially, I was focused on adding as many features as possible, thinking that more options would attract a broader audience. But as feedback started coming in, it became clear that users were overwhelmed and wanted simplicity and ease of use over a range of features.
This led to a major pivot: re-evaluating every feature to understand its real value and focusing on the core functionality that directly addressed the users’ needs. We ended up removing or consolidating many features, redesigning the UI for clarity, and emphasizing usability over versatility.
HeyForm
We changed HeyForm to open source, which breathed new life into the product.
We had to change our core feature after realizing that the initial one didn't actually solve the problem the way we thought.
The biggest pivot we made was realizing that our tool wasn’t just great for automating user support – it also worked really well as an interactive internal knowledge base. Initially, we focused on helping businesses streamline customer support, but as we received more feedback, we saw that teams were using it internally to quickly access resources, guidelines, and FAQs.
This shift allowed us to refine our tool for a dual purpose, making it even more valuable for companies – whether they're supporting their customers or empowering their internal teams with easy-to-access information integrated directly in Slack.