These days it’s important to be able to “change course fast” especially if you’re in a nimble startup environment. Don’t get me wrong you need to set your course and nail a roadmap, but if something comes up that’s going to make you grow faster than normal, you need to think about doing it. These onStartup Lessons Learned week I’m focusing on the right way to pivot the team for a big opportunity.

There are a few questions to ask yourself when considering a pivot:

1. Am I doing this for just one potential customer or will many customer benefit from a pivot
2. Does it mesh with our strategic plan?
3. Will it help us grow faster and gain traction?

If you answered yes to all of these good for you, a pivot is likely in order.

At Dasheroo we’ve been marching down a 5 pt. strategic path to get us to where we’d like to be. The plan did call for some partnerships but they don’t happen when you want them to, they don’t happen over night and they usually happen with a lot of luck coupled with your hard work at seeking them out. One such potential partnership is on the horizon so we had to pivot our team and their time and put some development and marketing effort into this partnership earlier than anticipated.

The first thing on your to-do list is to get your team around it. If you’ve got a great team and the pivot makes sense then they’ll follow the strategic marching orders to the end. So I gathered the team and talked to them about it and we went through it together. As a team we wanted to make sure that pivoting for this partnership:

1. Will benefit this customer or partner and all that come after, and it does. The work that Alex is doing for this partnership on OAuth gets us working with other partners quicker!
2. Goes along with what we need to do to grow. We don’t want to spend a ton of money on advertising on Google so getting our product distributed through partnerships is what we need to do and this one could be big.
3. Hopefully gets us to where we want to be faster and better. If this partnership works the way we’d like it to, we could potentially have a nice pop in growth.

It was important for me to include everyone in on the decision since the entire team will be doing a all of the work. And this team fortunately gets it. There’s no guarantee that it will work wonders for us but everyone understands that giving it our best shot is all we can do.Got a potential pivot coming up? Make sure everyone is on the same page! More on this partnership as we launch.