You're head of product at a technology company in Bogotá. Your new product isn't taking off: the market isn't responding the way you expected. In the room, half the team wants to double down —more marketing, more features— to "prove it works"; the other half wants to kill it and move on. But there's a third path, almost always the best one: recognize failure early and pivot, carrying the validated learning and assets to a better opportunity. Sony stuck with Betamax and Microsoft with the Zune until they lost; Google Glass failed with consumers and pivoted successfully to enterprise.
The situation
When a new product fails, the decision that creates or destroys value is what to do with what you already built. Pivoting means recognizing that the current path doesn't work and redeploying validated learning and assets —technology, brand, capabilities— toward a reframed opportunity where they can actually win. It's not surrendering or starting from zero: it's changing direction while keeping what you learned. Google Glass failed as a consumer product, but its technology and learning pivoted into a profitable enterprise business. The key is separating "the market has spoken, we need to change" from "let's push until we win".
Here's the trap, in two directions. Escalating commitment —doubling down to prove it works— is the sunk-cost fallacy: you throw good money after bad because "we already invested so much," and the market still doesn't want the product (Betamax in its format war, the Zune against the iPod). And killing it and abandoning it entirely stops the bleeding, but throws away the validated learning and assets that could salvage value in another direction. The defensible move is to pivot: cut losses on the failing approach and redeploy the learning to a better opportunity.