A pivot is a structured course correction in product, customer, business model, or technology strategy in response to learning from the market. It is made deliberately rather than by drift, and aimed at preserving what's working while changing what's not. It was popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup (2011) and adopted as standard vocabulary across modern startup work. It is one of the most misused words in the founder lexicon because every change gets called a pivot regardless of whether it's actually structural.
Ries identified ten specific pivot types, each describing a different dimension of change: zoom-in (a single feature becomes the whole product), zoom-out (the original product becomes a single feature of a bigger one),...