Pivot or Persevere Template

Resource

Pivot or Persevere Template

This template is a framework for making pivot or persevere decisions on an innovation project. It's a space to set clear criteria to keep running experiments (persevere), for success (scaling up), or for failure (kill or pivot.)

When to Use It

Use this template when:

Starting a new innovation project.
Setting clear success and failure criteria for a project.
Collecting the data to make a pivot, persevere, kill, or scale up decision.
The project is risky and the correct decision is not obvious.
Recording decisions and rationale.

Who Should Use It

This template can be used by startup founders, venture capitalists, accelerators, and business sponsors. Anyone who is trying to decide to invest more time, money, or people into a risky project can use this template effectively.

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How It Works

Read through the template from top to bottom and fill out sections as you go.

For each section, use the prompts to generate a number of ideas before deciding on what to fill out on the template.

Success:
Create your Success Criteria for scaling up.
Failure:
Create your Fail Condition for pivoting or killing a project.
Analyze:
Record the actual data.
Decide:
Make a data-driven decision and stick with it.

Authors and Contributors

Tristan Kromer

Tristan Kromer works with innovation teams and leaders to create amazing products and build startup ecosystems. He has worked with companies from early stage startups with zero revenue to enterprise companies with >$1B USD revenue. (Unilever, Swisscom, Salesforce, Fujitsu, LinkedIn) Tristan has worked with over 17 technology accelerator programs and ecosystem programs such as Innovation Norway, Vinnova (Sweden), Enterprise Ireland, NEST’up (Belgium), StartSmart (Estonia) and the Innovation Partnership Program (Vietnam-Finland) With his remaining hours, Tristan volunteers his time with early stage startups and blogs at GrasshopperHerder.com.

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