 That the story that I tell will be relevant to you and that there will be takeaways that you'll be able to apply within your context. This specifically is a story about a pivot that my company underwent about a year and a half ago. And so it's really targeted at people who either have recently gone through a pivot and maybe we can commiserate a little bit or for people that are working at companies that are considering embarking on a pivot and this may give you a bit of a sense of what to expect. In that light, I just want to ask how many people have worked at a company that has gone through one or more pivots in its history? Okay, and how about does anybody see a pivot on their horizon? Okay, all right, that's actually more or less what I expected. How many people don't know what a pivot is? That's totally fine because I'm going to be talking about what it is. Great, okay. So I apologize to those people who attended my talk yesterday. I'm going to start out with a bit of an introduction about myself and about my company just to provide context because this presentation is really about our specific experiences. So starting off in terms of who I am, I'm the product lead at Pulse Energy. My Twitter handle is up there. For the presentation I did yesterday, quite a few people tweeted about the things that they found valuable and interesting during the session. I'd like to encourage you as well to do the same thing. I really appreciate it, and I will try and respond to any of the points that you bring up over the course of the presentation. So in terms of my Agile experience, I've been doing Agile for quite a long time. I started in 2000 working for a company in Sweden that I convinced to adopt extreme programming. That got me hooked and from then I moved on and worked for ThoughtWorks for quite a few years, including spending a year and a half here in Bangalore. During that period, I had the pleasure of being in a position to organize India's first conference on Agile software development together with Nuresh, who's the conference organizer. And so it's very nice to be invited back and see the extent to which this conference has grown over the intervening, I think it's been about six years. So in terms of my company Pulse Energy, what we do, we're an energy management software company. So we build software that helps commercial buildings manage their energy consumption better. And what we do is we provide services to energy utilities that they can in turn offer to their commercial customers. So commercial buildings like this one, we look at analyze their data, look for ways in which their energy efficiency can be improved. And a big part of what we do is we were riding on the wave of smart meters and smart grid technology that's being deployed throughout the world. And as a product of the smart meters that are being deployed, a lot of data is being generated. That data presents certain challenges for utilities. Big part of what we do is we analyze and process all that data on their behalf. So we have a fairly sophisticated energy analytics back end that will analyze patterns of consumption for different businesses and make, provide opportunities, make recommendations for them in terms of how they can improve their overall energy efficiency. So what we do is we help them measure and track their energy savings. So if they implement certain measures, certain changes to the way that they're building operates, they're able to determine how how much energy they're saving as a result, and they can just then cost justify the implementation of those measures. We also look at how a building typically operates. What you see here on the screenshot is a typical load profile for a building. So what happens is overnight consumption is at a fairly flat level. During the course of the day, consumption rises to a peak as you enter peak occupancy. So during, let's say, key business hours and then falls down at the end of the day as people leave the building and that's the building system shut down. And so you can see that pattern repeated over time. We have analytics that go and analyze that for specific, for each individual building and identify situations in which things may not be performing as expected. Part of what we do is also engage occupants and the public in help build an understanding about energy consumption and ways in which they themselves as people who occupy a building affect the energy usage of that building. Our overall objective is to try and make the world a better place by reducing our carbon footprint. So as I said at the start of the talk yesterday, about a third of the greenhouse gas emissions in North America come from commercial buildings, so heating, cooling, lighting, ventilating buildings. So if we can have an impact on improving that efficiency, then that will have a net positive benefit for the planet. And we deal with not just electricity, but natural gas, water, steam, etc. Pretty much any sort of quantity that's being either consumed or generated within commercial buildings, we deal with it. And part of what we do is we try and eat our own dog food. So we apply the technologies that we build to our own office to look for ways in which we can use our our software and tools to improve our overall energy efficiency. That gives you a bit of a sense of what the company does. And so as I mentioned at the start, this is this is a personal story. This is our specific experience. I hope it has some relevance and resonates with you. So about a year and a half ago, this is this is when things started for us. So this is mid June, June, July 2011. Things were going very well with the company. We're receiving great recognition within the marketplace. We were doing well financially. Things were continuing to grow. We were adding on new customers. The company itself, I joined relatively early on. I was a seventh employee over that period of time. We'd more than doubled our headcount every year, which I mean, I'm not sure the size of the companies that you work for here. But going from seven to to 60, which is what it was at at the point of this. It's a pretty significant change. It's obviously not on the magnitudes of hundreds or thousands of people, but we're a start-up company. Our customers were happy with the services that we were providing. And because of the fact that we're a software as a service company, our revenue is based on annual subscriptions. And so the metric that we're very concerned about in terms of measuring our overall business efficiency is looking at churn rate. And so what we were seeing is that the vast, vast majority of our customers were regularly renewing their subscription to our service. So that's the best financial validation of the value that we're providing. I was fortunate to be surrounded by a really solid team. And one of the things that we've been doing for a long time is shipping new versions of our product to our customers every week. And this is actually something that I've spoken about in the past. Two years ago, I was invited to come to India to talk a little bit about some of our practices in that regard. But the thing was, looking out into the future, things were not as good as they might have appeared on the surface. One thing about the market that we were operating in, at least in terms of our local market, we had really great market penetration, but we were starting to reach market saturation. So we realized that we, at that point in time, we had about 85% of the available or addressable commercial customer base within our home territory. And we'd been trying to expand it to new markets, but we'd been having a really hard time doing that. So this was a significant problem for the growth of the company, because at that point in time, we were not a profitable company. We're still not a profitable company, which is natural for any sort of a startup, but a key challenge is to find some sort of a sustainable business model. And that's what we were struggling with. Part of it was we realized that within our home marketplace, we were being supported by a bit of a false economy. So there were some subsidies that were being offered to our customers that made our products attractive to them that did not exist in other places. So that was obviously a significant cause for concern. And so as I just mentioned, it was not leading us to the kind of growth that we needed in order to be able to turn the corner. Our overall company vision as well was still out of reach. The vision that had been established right from the start of the company was we wanted to be able to deliver energy efficiency services to one million buildings, which when we started, we had a couple of handful. That seemed like a really audacious goal. But with the pace that we were growing and the cap and the size of the market, it just did not seem like it was going to be achievable. So we knew that we needed to make some changes. And so there are a few key things that we realized about our position in the market. One was that our customers were not who we thought they were. And this, I mean, it seems really, it seems like such a strange thing. How can you make that mistake that presumably the people that you're selling to, you should know who you're selling to, right? It's a key aspect of the business. But it was part of the nature of this false economy that we were operating under. At the start of 2011, we had a big company away day where we went, we met at an offsite and talked about what our strategy was going to be for the year. And our goal was to double down our focus on large commercial customers, commercial customers that had large portfolios of buildings. After six months, so in the June-July timeframe, we realized that that strategy was a failure. Basically, we were having a really hard time acquiring new customers and new markets. It was too expensive for us to be able to bring them online. It was too expensive. Part of what we need to do in the absence of smart metering technology is we would go in and install our own digital metering or data logging technology. And that dramatically increased the cost of providing our services, especially as our entire business model is based around providing the software. And so that's where our margins were structured. So we were in significant trouble in terms of looking into the future. Moreover, in terms of trying to sell to this market of large commercial customers, they didn't really seem to have a burning need for the product that we were providing. We found that within our home market, it was relatively easy to find customers that had that need. But again, they were operating in a bit of a false economy where the costs of our services were heavily discounted. So those that did have a need, they tended to already have solutions as well, which was a bit of a problem for us. Because then we needed to usurp other competitors that were already well entrenched within those customers. And for the ones that didn't have a need, they didn't have an allocated budget. So these were some of the problems that we were running up against. What we did discover in this process is that really the people who did have the need were the energy utilities themselves. So prior to this point, we've been attempting to sell the commercial customers directly, but really the utilities were the ones that were interested in being able to offer energy efficiency services to their customers. There's a variety of reasons for that, and it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So in some cases, some of the regulated environments within North America, for example, the regulators required that the utilities achieve certain energy efficiency targets. Or for utilities that have a high cost of generation and investment in energy efficiency, and anything that they can save on the demand side, so on the consumption side, is electricity that they don't have to generate or buy from the market. So for them, there's an economic incentive. But for commercial customers themselves, more often than not, they perceived their energy bills as being just part of doing business. It wasn't something that they necessarily perceived that they could do something about. And more often than not, it was a sufficiently small proportion of their overall operating budget that they were not prepared to make a significant investment in it. So we'd identified that really utilities were who we wanted to target. And we knew that from the start. We knew that we wanted to go after utilities. It just seemed like it was too hard. So here we were, a small startup company dealing with these large utility customers, utilities of several thousand employees that are normally risk averse. And here we were, a little startup company that was not necessarily based on their jurisdiction. So how would we convince them to start doing business with us? So we had limited experience selling to utilities directly. But we realized that that was something that we needed to change and we needed to change quickly. So part of recognizing that we needed to switch our focus onto utilities was also a realization that utilities had a different need from what commercial customers had needed. So not only did that mean that we were changing who we were selling to, but we were also changing the products that we were providing. And our core flagship product, which is a software product, which is targeted at large commercial customers, they tended to already have a solution for that. But what we realized was, from talking with them, was that what they really wanted was something that would service their small to medium size enterprise market, which was interesting. And that was something that we felt maybe we could offer something for, but we had limited experiences dealing with SMEs as well. So here are some of the challenges that we were up against. The third thing is, and this is the case I think for any established company, is that we had a long series of commitments to existing customers. So it made it very difficult to say, okay, we're just going to drop whatever we're doing and course correct and go after this new market. Our team was already stretched in terms of what it was we were going to deliver. Every new account that we brought on meant some amount of customization was required. And for any type of enterprise deal, normally your delivery is going to lag the sales effort by some period. So we were still working on delivering accounts that had been closed, deals that had been signed six months prior. So in terms of the product team, we had our hands full. We didn't really have the bandwidth in order to be able to take on a new type of customer. And a new type of end user. We also had no budget for hiring on new staff, which is kind of what would be typical in this type of situation. And so I mentioned that already. In terms of our existing customers, we couldn't just say, okay, well we're not going to honor these deals that we've signed because A, we needed the recurring revenue that would be generated from those deals in order to keep the company going. And moreover, our reputation with our existing customers was the key for us to be able to win business with utilities. So we basically, we couldn't piss off our existing customers. We had to keep them happy. Yet at the same time, deliver a, deliver to a new customer base. So all this came to a head. The CEO said, okay, we needed to, we needed to pivot. We needed to change direction. So what is a pivot? A pivot as defined by Eric Reese in the Lean Startup book is a structured change designed to test a fundamental hypothesis about the product, business model, and engine of growth. So it really is this change in direction for a company. Normally, the key thing is that the vision is kept consistent, but it's a change in strategy. So our vision was consistent. We still wanted to, we're still focused on providing energy efficiency services to the commercial sector. We wanted to get to one million buildings, but how we were going to get there was now going to be different. So in terms of what that looked like, as I just said, it's our original strategy was focused on selling directly to large commercial customers, helping them manage their energy use and track their energy savings. And the key thing is this was a tool for those types of customers to use, whereas our new strategy was the weird delivering energy efficiency programs to the utility's entire commercial customer base. So part of our pitch to utility was to say, okay, not only will we help you with your large commercial customers, but we'll also help you with your small commercial customers, and it will all be based on a unified platform that will be easy for you to manage and administer. Of course, we didn't have anything for the small to medium commercial customers, and we were forthright with that. But in terms of any of these sort of enterprise sales efforts, the first part is talking about the vision and seeing whether or not there's interest in the vision. And the good thing is that this seemed to resonate with utilities. So utilities were interested in this story about having one platform and suite of products that would serve this entire customer base, especially the SME side, which was traditionally underserved by the utilities. Actually, maybe I'll digress briefly to talk a little bit about SME versus large commercial. So what's an SME? So an SME is basically, it's your corner store, it's your, it's a florist, it's a dry cleaner, it's a hardware store, it's a small office, it's retail, it's restaurants, those kind of things. From a utility perspective, they tend not to have very good information about their customers, which is part of the reason why this is a very right market for being able to address. But it actually represents about 90 to 95% of the utility's commercial customer base. So it's the vast majority of their customers, which they did not have a good way to serve. And part of the reason why was they tended to view it fairly homogenously. Utilities, when they think about their customers, often think about them in terms of tariffs. So what rate category are you? Do you consume less than 50,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year? Okay, you are a small to medium customer. It doesn't matter that you could really be any type of business within that. And so what we were offering was something that would deal with the diversity of that market and the challenges associated with reaching that. How we would do that, we had no idea. But this was just the pitch to start with. So really what we were looking, in terms of the things that we were changing, we were going after a new customer, so we were moving from selling to large commercial accounts to selling directly to energy utilities. We had a new end user, so within large commercial accounts, many of them, especially the ones that were our customers, employed somebody in the role of what's called an energy manager. Whereas an energy manager is somebody who is responsible for managing the energy use and energy costs of a portfolio. So in terms of large commercial customer accounts that we were dealing with, it might be university campuses, so there's obviously lots of buildings on the campus, hospitals, which are large consumers of energy, and often they're unified into a health authority, might be municipalities. So really any sort of commercial entity that owned lots of different buildings. So that's who we were working with. And the thing about an energy manager is they have expertise in this domain. They understand energy consumption. Whereas now we are proposing selling to small to medium business owners and operators who had no understanding about energy use, no understanding of how their buildings operated. So it's a very different type of user. And really what we were selling was a new product. So as opposed to providing a tool for energy managers, what we were offering is basically a way for utilities to offer products to their customers. And they do that in terms of pilots and programs, at least within North America. And we had no idea what those were really about. Other than some experience in terms of operating within the context of existing utility programs, we had never actually sold a program to a utility, which is obviously much broader in scope than just delivering a software tool. So in other words, this was a really significant change for us as a company. And because of the storm clouds that I showed before, this was coming to a head. This was about the company initiative. Either we made this change or we would have to dramatically shrink the size of the company and kind of continue on as being a fairly small boutique company just serving a local market. So one thing about a pivot that is important to keep in mind is while a lot is changing, so I just mentioned all the different things that we were changing as a product of pursuing this new direction, it's important to stay somewhat grounded in terms of where you are. What keeps some of your core business fundamentals in place. So some of the things that we were not changing was we were still operating within the same business domain, so we were still dealing with commercial customers, we were still dealing with energy efficiency. Our existing products, while we may or may not be able to leverage them in order to service these new types of customers, we could at the very least use what we had built as a platform. And we continued on with our brand and the reputation that we built up. So in terms of the approach that we took, the first step was assembling what we called a tiger team. So it was a cross-functional team of leaders throughout the organization through all the various departments to determine what the best way was going forward. And we had three primary objectives. One was to reorient the sales team because we needed to now sell to a different type of customer. So what we needed to do was start building connections with people within utilities in order to be able to sell to them and start to build up a pipeline. We needed to refocus our marketing efforts, so no longer were we attempting to provide messaging or knowledge about commercial customer accounts, we were now trying to build up a knowledge base of the North American utility market. And the third step was to repurpose our products in order to have something to show to utilities that were interested in buying our services. So three things went well in this process. One was that the sales team shifted very quickly. What they did was all but one sales person switched to focus on utilities. We had only one person that was still working on trying to close existing commercial account prospects that we had within our pipeline. The marketing team also switched very quickly, and one of the key things that they did was they revamped the website. So that our website now was focused on messaging directly to utilities. And that actually proved to be a really big win for us and helped land one of our first and most significant accounts. And then also built up a knowledge base of this new market that they were pursuing. So these groups switched very quickly, which was good. And actually it was essential because really these are the parts of the organization that need to lead. If you don't have, because of the deal length associated with selling into enterprise customers, you really need to have a head start on these endeavors in order to change the direction of the company. What was slipping though was the product side, which is the part that I was involved with, and I'll get into some of the details there in a sec. But we had a number of problems with this, with this Tiger team approach. Number one was because of the fact that it was assembled from leaders within the company, they couldn't really be dedicated to the team. They had other responsibilities, ongoing responsibilities to other initiatives that were happening within the company. So it didn't necessarily have the focus, even though it was about the company initiative and there was a lot of pressure to make these kind of changes, it didn't necessarily receive the attention and dedication that it really needed. Another mistake that we made was we hired a new person to lead this team. They came in in a senior executive role, and there were a few issues with that. Well, there was one advantage, which was that because they were new, they could be dedicated to it, which was good. The problem was that because they were new, they didn't have a relationship with all the people that they needed to work with in order to change the direction for the company, so that was a problem. The other was that they were remote, and that just exacerbates the first problem. The other thing is because this was truly a company changing event, we tried to have broad representation from across the company, and as a result the team was quite large, which made it slow and expensive to get things done. There were other significant initiatives underway, so the timing for this was fine from a sales and marketing perspective because of the fact that their activities were drying up, so they had some slack. In terms of the product team, we were in the midst of a major product revamp, so the timing was really bad. We had significant pressure to deliver quickly. We spent over three months in terms of turning, just trying to figure out how we were going to do this, and unfortunately in the process we lost some key people. Attrition is not a surprising or uncommon part of any sort of significant organizational change endeavor, and that's effectively what this was. I do think that it was the right approach for us to take, especially in retrospect. We did not do the best job in terms of executing it. Part of this with being an experience report, I'm giving you guys some of the things that did not go as well for us, and trying not to cover up some of the things that we really should have done a better job with. That's a great question. The question was, what do we do with the existing customers? That's actually the essence of the title of this presentation in terms of pivoting mid-flight, which is that if you read some of the literature and the examples of companies that have gone through pivots, there's often no mention of what happens to their existing customers. There's a few reasons for that. One is, often companies that talk about pivots and talk about pivoting a lot are early-stage startup companies that either don't have any customers yet, so it's very easy for them to change direction, or they don't have any customers of consequence, so they can effectively drop those customers. What we did was, we didn't feel that we could drop our existing customers, so we needed to figure out ways that we could continue to service those customers, and we do, to this date, continue to service those customers, while at the same time addressing these whole new class of customers. That was a significant stress, but that was one that we... I don't know that we had any other choice but to endure. Do we lose any customers through the process? No, actually. I'm not sure what that tells you. Not that I'm aware of, at least, but... We did not tell them we were changing direction. We were continuing to provide the services to them that had always been offered, and we provide software as a service. As a result, we're continuously changing the product, and it's normally not done with... It may be based on a request that they've made, but more often than not, it's based on a request that another customer has made, and they go in and they see, oh, okay, there's this new capability they can try it out. Really, all that we were doing was ramping down the amount of effort that was being spent on that flagship product in order to focus on this new product. But we did still need to continue to deliver on the commitments that we'd already made through the deals that we'd signed. Though we did find that in many cases there was some flexibility, because often what happens, especially around some sort of an enterprise deal, there's a number of expectations up front in terms of what the product does and what the customer would like the product to do, and then once they get in and start using the product, then they realize that actually they didn't need what they'd originally thought they needed that much, or maybe they needed something different, and so sometimes it's possible to get out of some of those commitments, and so we did that a little bit as well. But the key thing was we really tried to do both. We do, and so that was part of our vision, that we had our existing product which was focused on large commercial customers. We were going to also be able to service the small to medium commercial customers, potentially through a new product, which is what I'm going to talk about next. And our offering to utility was we would provide something that would meet your entire commercial customer base. So effectively our new strategy was adding a new product into our product line. So which comes to this, which was something that we really struggled with on the product team, which maybe some of you have had similar sorts of challenges with, which is do we build a new product in order to meet this need, or do we repurpose our existing product in order to service this new type of customer. And what we really, the rest of the company didn't understand why this was a big deal. They were just like, just get on with it, just start building something. We were like, well, we don't know if what we're building is a new product, or it's just like some modifications to our existing product. And the reason that we were very concerned about this was we really were, we knew that we had all kinds of commitments to our existing product. If we were adding a new product line, we would be crushed under the support burden of having to support both products at the same time. So that was something we were really, really worried about. And we were guided by this blind hope that we could take what we built for large commercial customers and just simplify it and offer it to small commercial customers. Because really the way that the small commercial customer market was perceived as being, they were like unsophisticated large commercial customers. It was basically something that we wanted to convince ourselves of. But the more that we looked at it, the more that we realized that was completely and patently false and that really only a new product would do. Sorry, there was a question? I'm sorry. So that was what we were grappling with. And so I'll get to it in just a second. So we were in analysis paralysis. We were trying to iterate on modifications to the existing product, what it would look like, what a new product would look like. And we were also looking at a new product. It's opening up a whole new can of worms. Really it could be anything. And so it was a pretty daunting prospect. So we spent three months trying to figure out how we could bolt on this new set of requirements to the existing product. Ultimately we didn't and we started work on the MVP that I talked about yesterday. I wish that I had paid more attention when reading this quote from the Lean startup because I think it would have made it much clearer. He redefines a pivot as being a new strategic hypothesis. So we've got a new strategy that will require a new MVP to test. And so that to me made it very clear that we had a new hypothesis. Really we should start with a new MVP so that we can iterate as quickly as possible in order to figure out what is really going to be the best thing for this market. And it may turn out that the best thing is actually very close to what we originally had and then we could just modify our existing product in order to meet that. But starting from the position of let's just build this MVP and iterate on that was I think is a really good strategy. And that's what we ended up doing but not without a lot of agonizing and consuming, burning up a lot of time. Go ahead. It wasn't that it was too costly, it was that we basically had one product and it was subdivided into a few different products but realistically we had one product. So the notion of adding a new product was pretty daunting. And then really that opened up the question of well what was this product going to be? What technology were we going to use to build it? Because we knew, I'm going to touch on it in a bit, that we weren't happy with the technology that we were using. Our flagship product had been built in Java. As I mentioned yesterday it was not giving us the pace of iteration that we really wanted. So then okay well in the process of this maybe we should consider new technology. So we've got new technology, new product, new set of interfaces. We had usability problems with our existing product. We knew that what we needed to provide to this SME customer is a non-technical customer. It needed to be super easy, super intuitive, very basic. What was that going to be? So it was a really daunting prospect. That was part of the reason why I think we kept ourselves in a bit of a state of denial about it. In retrospect it seems very obvious we should have switched right away but it was something that we really agonized over. And I don't know has anybody else been in the same sort of situation where you needed to make this decision of do I add a new product or do I repurpose my existing product? Absolutely, absolutely. And it's, I don't know, it's a bit of a weird thing. And to a certain extent I was absolutely. We'd invested about three years into building up our flagship product. And it was in the same domain. It was dealing with energy related information. All we needed to do was present it slightly differently to this new customer base. And ultimately that was shackling us to the potential of what the product could be. And by making a split and deciding okay we're going to instead focus on building an MVP it really made a significant difference for us. And ultimately it made a significant difference for the company. So we finally got traction once we decided to build a new product but this was in November of 2011. This was about five months after we had embarked on the pivot and in the meantime the rest of the company had already changed. And I personally was one of the people that was most resistant around starting a new product. So there were some implications associated with us embarking on this pivot. One was that we were taking on a much longer sales cycle. So we were dealing with instead of selling to commercial customers which are slow moving themselves we are now selling to utilities which are really slow moving and would typically have a more rigorous decision making process around procurement. So what we needed to do was we needed to be able to extend our runway which means we needed to ensure that we could survive this drought that we could anticipate happening so we wouldn't be able to bring in a new deal for quite a long time. So as a result we needed to do layoffs. We cut our headcount by 40%. We went through three consecutive rounds of layoffs. I don't know how many people attended Linda's talk before this but the whole mantra of like this time it will be different. This time we're done with the layoffs. We've laid off just as many people as we need. We do it three times which is very painful for the people involved. Some people were basically out of a job as a product of this change. So with us serving commercial customers part of what we would do is we would spec and install hardware. So we had a set of engineers that were focused on the hardware side of things. Basically all of them became, their role became unnecessary because of the fact that we were selling to utilities that were involved in rolling out smart meters and so the hardware side was all taken care of by the utilities. And so those people were given the choice that either they had to take on different roles or where they could leave. So those were the obvious candidates for layoffs, for people who weren't interested in making those sort of change or were not a good fit for making the change but there were a lot of additional people who were in important roles that needed to go as well. And on top of that we had attrition in some senior positions which is also difficult because here you are trying to change the direction of the company and some of the senior leadership leave. Two was as a product of embarking on this change and I touched on this in the MVP talk yesterday was that now that we were selling to utilities we had this schism, this split between who we're selling to so who the buyers of our services are and who the end users are and what that meant was that prior to that we had been relying on marketing to a certain extent to provide user research services because of the fact that those two roles were unified. Now they were split and as a result we needed to build more user research into product management which was a good thing. I mean it was where it ultimately needed to be but what that meant was we needed to add additional capacity and additional skills in those areas so we had new roles that we needed to fill which meant that at the same time we just finished firing people we were now hiring new people and we were also trying to change direction of the company so a lot of things going on within the company that was making it quite difficult. The other thing and I touched on this a bit in terms of some of the discussion about new products was it was good that we've got new opportunities but what do we do? The main thing that I think really started to get things moving on the product side was we formed a dedicated product team that was going to start work on building up the MVP. That's just my reminder that... Yeah, so the question is why did some senior people leave? There are a few reasons. Well one is the company itself was going under tremendous stress as a product of making this change in direction and so some people got fed up and left some people didn't necessarily buy into the vision or for the new direction or feel that we could successfully make this transition and some people felt that they were getting further and further away from what they really wanted to do or what they'd initially been hired to do so there were a variety of reasons but I think this presentation is a bit of a cautionary tale around Pivot so that if you do end up going through this you may have some of the same sort of experiences and you can know what to anticipate because often it's presented in a bit of a rosy light because I've got about 10 minutes left I'm going to try and speed through some of the rest of the material just to give you a sense of where we ended up to know what their product market fit is going to be in fact in 2012 within Forbes it was ranked as being the second most overused start-up word and so as a result it gets bandied around a lot and people talk about it as being this great thing that led to the reinvention of their company but it's a lot more than that it's more than the rosy picture that's often presented in the press the point that you raised what about the existing customers I haven't read anybody who talked about what happened to their existing customers when they all of a sudden decided to build a new product nobody talks about what happens to them in our case they're still around we couldn't just fire them so overall this was a really painful process for us to the extent that the word pivot itself is now basically a banned word at our company like nobody says the word pivot without getting a slap so it could be a big thing but here's how things have turned out so this was going back from a year and a half to go looking at where we are now so as a result of making this change November 2011 we assembled a dedicated product team we built our first iteration of the MVP which we produced for an RFP response within one month so it looked like this by February of 2012 we had our first significant opportunity so you can see there's been a few changes the utility logo is bladded out but we had we were now starting to we started to build momentum around the MVP where we were doing we had done about 10 demos to prospective customers and we rolled out our first pilot with the new product last August so it took a while to build up this new product but in that process we were doing lots of iteration on the MVP so this is the silver lining we closed our first major deal with this product in December so that was just a little bit over a year after we launched on it but this deal we're delivering to 50,000 small to medium commercial customers by July of this year it's a multi-million dollar deal it's bigger than any deal in the history of the company we would not have been able to get there had we not decided to make this decision had we not decided to produce a new product and go after that despite all the problems so in retrospect the pivot was it a good idea? absolutely it was something that we needed to do within a company at the point in time that I submitted this talk to this conference I actually did not expect it to be accepted I wasn't even sure how many people would be interested in hearing our story but at that point in time so that this was back in July we were still very much in the middle of things we had no idea how things were going to turn out we had some good leads and prospects we had no deals that were closed that only happened quite recently so it really could have turned out the other way too and often when you read stories about pivots they're presented as success stories but I could very well be here giving a presentation that was telling you about how well, I probably wouldn't say that it had failed but it had at the very least not gotten to a position where it was starting to yield results fortunately I can tell a good news story so nobody really told us that it was going to be very nobody said it would be easy but nobody said it would be as painful as it was as well incidentally, so we did another pivot in November we did not call it a pivot and this was what's called a channel pivot so what we did instead part of what we realized as a product of doing all this iteration on MVPs with small to medium commercial customers was we realized the utilities actually have at least within North America have very little email penetration of their commercial customer base and so as a result it's difficult to reach them via email and then it's difficult to get them online moreover especially the results of the pilots that we were running we were finding that commercial customers were not really coming online to use our services and so what we did instead was we said okay what we're doing is we're sending out paper reports we're not doing web applications anymore we are doing paper reports we didn't know anything about print but we made a decision this time the switch was immediate within the team partially because we'd already been through this process partially also because instead of being kind of a top down bet the company initiative this was a bottom up we had a sales opportunity so I was I led the team that was that had built the MVP that was going after SME I said to my team I said okay drop what you're doing we're doing print reports and everybody was like okay let's do it so again good news here is we sold this deal to that prospect in the end of December 2012 we're delivering paper reports to 50,000 SME customers in May of this year which I'm very busy with right now so again it had we not decided to embark on this and make this change in direction and then change again we would have missed out on these opportunities so in summary lessons learned one thing that's really key is ensure that you can assemble a dedicated team that has no other responsibilities for me and for my other team members I insisted that this was all that we were going to focus on delivering and that made a big difference we were really able to come together collaborate as a team and focus on delivering the MVP start with the new MVP and then treat your existing product as a platform so even though it may have lots of functionality in it that you want to be able to leverage just see what you can pull out but keep your MVP separate and distinct following a process that's both top down and bottom up so obviously you need to have buy-in at the highest levels of the organization but you also need to have people in the lower levels that have bought into this process as well don't underestimate how long it takes to change direction for a company I mean for us we were a company of 60 went down to a company of 30 to 40 it's not a big company but it still takes a long time to be able to make this type of a significant transition one thing I did learn though is having subsequently pivoted it's much easier the second time and at least what other people say is it keeps getting easier the more often that you do it but I think part of what made it easier the second time was it was much more limited in scope and part of the reason it was more limited in scope was because it had not been that long since we had last made this sort of change and then pivoting earlier rather than later I think that's a truism and I think you always end up pivoting too late but it's worthwhile advice anyway so that's it for the presentation thank you very much I hope this has been informative for you thanks for sticking around and as we're just about to move on to the panel I'm very interested to talk to other people who have had similar sorts of experiences after this thank you