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Structuring experimentation: Implementing Growth Hacking in
new ventures
Silvia Sanasi
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Economics and Management, Piazza Universit`
a 1 - Universit¨
atsplatz 1, 39100, Bolzano, Bozen, Italy
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Growth Hacking
New ventures
Experimentation
Organizational structure
Entrepreneurship
Scaling
ABSTRACT
Recent academic and managerial literature has paid signicant attention to experimentation methods employed
at different stages of a new venture’s lifecycle. Alongside the widely popularized Lean Startup method, Growth
Hacking has emerged as an effective approach for supporting venture growth. While previous studies have
examined experimentation from the process and individual perspectives, research on the integration of these
methods within increasingly complex organizational structures remains limited. This article presents a
comparative case study of two new ventures that adopted Growth Hacking while scaling. The ndings reveal two
approaches to the organizational implementation of Growth Hacking—either bridging or permeating experimen-
tation throughout the organization—and explore their characteristics in terms of organizational conguration,
the structure of marketing and product units, key roles, governance of experimentation, and associated benets
and shortcomings. These ndings contribute to the literature on structuring experimentation and scaling in new
ventures.
1. Introduction
“No company today has any reason not to establish a growth team—or
multiple teams as the case may be—and doing so doesn’t require aban-
doning traditional organizational structures or traditional marketing
strategies.”
(Ellis &Brown, 2017, p. 16)
Experimentation has become a new mantra in entrepreneurship. A
growing body of studies advocates for the use of experimentation in new
ventures to both validate business viability in the early stages (e.g.,
Blank &Eckhardt, 2023; Camuffo et al., 2020; Leatherbee &Katila,
2020), and to ensure business continuity and sustainability as the ven-
ture grows (e.g., Eisenmann, 2021; Paluch et al., 2020; Sanasi et al.,
2023).
Over the past decade, numerous managerial books and popular press
articles have highlighted various experimentation-based methods that
have proven effective at different stages of a new venture’s lifecycle.
Among the most popular methods are the Lean Startup approach (Ries,
2011), which supports new venture creation, and Growth Hacking (Ellis
&Brown, 2017; Holiday, 2014), which focuses on venture growth.
Growth Hacking involves rapid testing and iteration to expand a ven-
ture’s customer base quickly through data-driven decision-making
(Bargoni et al., 2024b; Conway &Hemphill, 2019; Cristofaro et al.,
2025).
Unlike the Lean Startup method, which emphasizes long-term busi-
ness model validation (Ghezzi &Cavallo, 2020), Growth Hacking entails
shorter, faster experiments to identify growth mechanisms with minimal
resource commitment (Troisi et al., 2020). This makes it particularly
useful in the scaling phase, where ventures aim to expand their customer
base without proportionally increasing the resources deployed (Sanasi
et al., 2023). Growth Hacking is widely adopted by digital ventures in
particular, due to their ability to scale “efciently and effectively”
(Santoro et al., 2024, p. 75) by leveraging the affordances of digital
infrastructures (Huang et al., 2017;Giustiziero et al., 2023).
Despite its growing application, research on Growth Hacking is
limited compared to the Lean Startup method (Contigiani &Levinthal,
2019; Zahra et al., 2024). While prior studies have explored its role in
business model innovation and scaling (Cavallo et al., 2023; Sanasi
et al., 2023), dened its core principles (Troisi et al., 2020), and high-
lighted its practical applications (Bohnsack &Liesner, 2019; Feiz et al.,
2021), there remains a gap in understanding how Growth Hacking can
be integrated into an organization’s structure.
Recent studies have called for research on how experimentation is
structured within organizations (Sanasi, 2023). While experimentation
methods like Growth Hacking are often viewed as a link between
strategy formulation and implementation (Bargoni et al., 2024b), most
E-mail address: silvia.sanasi@unibz.it.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Business Research
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jbusres
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.115084
Received 6 April 2024; Received in revised form 11 November 2024; Accepted 17 November 2024
Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
0148-2963/© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/ ).
studies have adopted a process-level (Contigiani &Levinthal, 2019;
Felin et al., 2020; Sanasi &Ghezzi, 2024) or individual-level perspective
(Felin &Zenger, 2009; Grimes, 2018; Zellweger &Zenger, 2023).
Organizational structuration remains a key challenge in new venture
development (Burton et al., 2019; Piaskowska et al., 2021), requiring
the denition of governance structures, roles and responsibilities,
resource allocation, and process standardization (Alexy et al., 2021;
DeSantola et al., 2023; Greiner, 1998; Picken, 2017; Shepherd &Patzelt,
2022). This need is even more prominent during scaling, when ventures
face signicant challenges to match organizational structuration and
growth (DeSantola &Gulati, 2017; Moedt et al., 2024; Sanasi et al.,
2023; Van Lancker et al., 2023).
The importance of organizational structuration has also been
emphasized in the strategic management literature. Building on Gid-
dens’s (1984) structuration theory, studies have argued that structuring
work within an organization is essential for the enactment of strategy
and to shape and enhance individual agency (Pozzebon, 2004; Whit-
tington, 2015). Thus, investigating the implementation of Growth
Hacking within ventures can deepen the current understanding of how
experimentation can be structured within organizations. Based on these
considerations, this study aims to answer the following research ques-
tion: How can organizations implement Growth Hacking within their orga-
nizational structure?
To address this gap, this article presents a comparative case study of
two new ventures that implemented Growth Hacking and examines how
they embedded it into their organizational structure. The study draws on
interviews with key informants from the ventures and expert Growth
Hacking consultants who supported them in the process, supplemented
by archival data provided by the informants and gathered from public
sources.
This study’s ndings reveal two distinct organizational congura-
tions: bridging and permeating Growth Hacking into the organization.
Specically, ventures can create a dedicated Growth unit responsible for
governing all experimentation activities, acting as a bridge between
marketing and product units. Alternatively, ventures can make Growth
Hacking structural by integrating a Growth expert within each division
to permeate experimentation across the entire organization. The nd-
ings of this study delve into the characteristics of these two approaches
to implementing Growth Hacking, including organizational congura-
tions, structure of marketing and product units, key roles, governance of
experimentation, and the respective benets and shortcomings of each
approach.
Building on these ndings, this study makes three key contributions.
First, it advances the growing literature on Growth Hacking (Bargoni
et al., 2024b;Bohnsack &Liesner, 2019; Santoro et al., 2024; Troisi
et al., 2020), bridging the current gaps in understanding how to
implement Growth Hacking within organizations. Second, it extends the
understanding of entrepreneurial experimentation (e.g., Felin &Zenger,
2009; Gans et al., 2019) by responding to recent calls for research on
structuring experimentation within growing organizations (Sanasi,
2023). Specically, this study sheds light on how to facilitate the
enactment of experimentation through the structuration of activities
within an organization (Whittington, 2015), linking Growth Hacking
with organization theory (Giddens, 1984). Third, it enriches research on
organizing for scaling (Alexy et al., 2021; DeSantola &Gulati, 2017;
Piaskowska et al., 2021) by providing an empirical account of how
growing new ventures can organize to enact their growth strategy
through Growth Hacking as they scale. These ndings also offer valuable
insights for entrepreneurs and managers, providing actionable guide-
lines on how to structure an organization to effectively integrate
experimentation.
2. Theoretical background
2.1. Growth Hacking
Growth Hacking is a managerial approach that originated from
digital marketing, rst introduced by Ryan Holiday in his book Growth
Hacker Marketing (Holiday, 2014) as “anything that gets or keeps cus-
tomers”(Holiday, 2017), and later conceptualized by Sean Ellis and
Morgan Brown in their book Hacking Growth (2017). It has also been
dened as “a new way of scaling businesses”(Bohnsack &Liesner, 2019,
p. 62), intended to help entrepreneurs and managers identify the most
promising strategies for promoting growth (Conway &Hemphill, 2019).
The approach involves a series of structured steps, including hypothesis
formulation, testing, and iteration, aimed at scaling the organization’s
business model once product-market t is achieved and the focus shifts
to growing the customer base (Holiday, 2014).
Growth Hacking contrasts with traditional marketing methods that
often require signicant resource investments (Bargoni et al., 2024b;
Santoro et al., 2024), instead favoring a leaner process that seeks to
identify the key drivers of exponential growth (Conway &Hemphill,
2019; Ellis &Brown, 2017). According to Bargoni et al. (2024c), Growth
Hacking involves a “process of rapid experimentation and imple-
mentation of resource-light and cost-effective digital marketing tactics
to help acquire and retain an active user base, sell products, and scale
the business efciently and effectively. It uses traceable marketing tools,
so that data from individual and specic stages of the customer journey
or funnel can be analyzed to assist in making decisions”(p. 2).
The process follows four phases: (i) analyzing and observing the
context using both qualitative and quantitative data, (ii) ideating and
generating hypotheses for growth experiments, (iii) prioritizing exper-
iments to determine which should be executed rst, and (iv) testing
these hypotheses against empirical data (Ellis &Brown, 2017). This
process is highly iterative, as “driving growth is a process that is never
fully done”(Ellis &Brown, 2017, p. 508). The reliance on empirical
data, continuous testing, and learning from experiments to inform
decision-making (Bargoni et al., 2024c) demonstrates a strong concep-
tual alignment between Growth Hacking and established entrepre-
neurial experimentation theory (Cristofaro et al., 2025), which
emphasizes hypothesis-driven testing, adaptive learning, and resource
efciency (e.g., Felin &Zenger, 2009; Murray &Tripsas, 2004).
Initially conceived to support managers and entrepreneurs in scaling
businesses (Bohnsack &Liesner, 2019), Growth Hacking has been linked
to business model innovation (Cavallo et al., 2023), continuous learning,
customer relationship improvement (Troisi et al., 2020), learning from
failure (Bargoni et al., 2024c), and the integration of AI into organiza-
tional decision-making processes (Santoro et al., 2024). It has also been
proposed as a method for aligning strategy formulation with imple-
mentation (Bargoni et al. 2024b), especially during scaling (Sanasi et al.,
2023). However, beyond monitoring growth metrics as KPIs for exper-
iments (Bargoni et al. 2024c;Sanasi et al., 2023), studies have high-
lighted that successful implementation of Growth Hacking depends on
its integration into the organization (Bohnsack &Liesner, 2019).
Yet, despite its widespread use in the entrepreneurial community
(Ellis &Brown, 2017; Holiday, 2014), research has paid limited atten-
tion to Growth Hacking (Bargoni et al., 2024b, 2024c), particularly
regarding the important aspect of its integration into organizational
structures. To bridge this gap, research should explore how new ven-
tures can effectively implement Growth Hacking, and experimentation-
based methods more generally, by integrating them within organiza-
tional structures.
2.2. Structuring experimentation within the organization
Although interest in entrepreneurial experimentation has grown in
recent years (Zellweger &Zenger, 2023), the understanding of experi-
mentation in entrepreneurship has primarily focused on the process (e.
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
2
g., Contigiani &Levinthal, 2019; Felin et al., 2020; Liedtka et al., 2024)
and individual experiences connected (e.g., Felin &Zenger, 2009;
Grimes, 2018). In contrast, the understanding of how organizations
implement experimentation within their structure is still limited (Sanasi,
2023).
According to organization theory, structures provide guiding prin-
ciples for resource control and establish the rules that govern the or-
ganization. Giddens (1984) argued that structures play an important
role in enabling (and constraining) individual agency by dening
organizational members’tasks, activities, roles and responsibilities. In
strategic management, this idea has been extended to suggest that, by
enabling and constraining individual action, structures facilitate strat-
egy enactment (Pozzebon, 2004). Since strategy is a socially accom-
plished and situated activity, structure shapes the possibilities for
strategic action available to organizational actors (Whittington, 2015)
and thereby inuences the entire organization’s strategy (Golsorkhi
et al., 2015).
Unlike established organizations, new ventures are inherently ori-
ented toward growth, change, and innovation (Carland et al., 1984),
requiring them to scale their organizational structure to sustain
customer base growth (DeSantola &Gulati, 2017; Bohan et al., 2024)—a
particularly challenging task (Moedt et al., 2024;Picken, 2017;Pias-
kowska et al., 2021) while also ensuring protability (Varga et al.,
2023). Challenges include dening the division of labor and reallocating
resources (Alexy et al., 2021), reorganizing roles and responsibilities,
especially among top management (Van Lancker et al., 2023), managing
knowledge (Shepherd &Patzelt, 2022), and onboarding new employees
throughout the process (Snihur &Clarysse, 2022) to prevent negative
experiences and burnout (Genedy et al., 2024). Scaling ventures must
also balance the exibility that allows them to seize new opportunities
with the structure needed to grow into sustainable organizations (Burton
et al., 2019; DeSantola &Gulati, 2017).
At the same time, experimentation is vital to venture survival and
development (Camuffo et al., 2020; Murray &Tripsas, 2004) and con-
tinues to be during scaling (Sanasi et al., 2023). Even after achieving
product-market t (Eisenmann &Wagonfeld, 2014), ventures must
continue to pursue learning and experimentation (Jones &Schou,
2023), albeit focusing on different aspects of their business model
(Sanasi et al., 2023). Yet, the lack of clarity on how experimentation can
be structured within the organization (Sanasi, 2023), particularly during
scaling (DeSantola &Gulati, 2017; Piaskowska et al., 2021), leaves an
important gap in understanding how experimentation ts into organi-
zational structuration.
Drawing on the relationship between structure and strategy
(Whittington, 2015), structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) offers a
theoretical lens to explore how experimentation activities are structured
within organizations and how new ventures use these structures to
achieve their strategic goals. In particular, little attention has been paid
to the role of organizational structures—such as governance, resource
allocation, process standardization, roles and responsibilities (Alexy
et al., 2021; Moedt et al., 2024;Shepherd &Patzelt, 2022;Van Lancker
et al., 2023)—in enabling or constraining employee actions and de-
cisions related to a venture’s growth strategy. By leveraging organiza-
tional structuration for strategy enactment and enhancing individual
agency, ventures can design structures that integrate experimentation
and empower employees to innovate, take risks, and drive growth.
Growth Hacking embodies a set of organizational practices
(Bohnsack &Liesner, 2019) that allow ventures to test and implement
changes in their business model to grow their customer base (Sanasi
et al., 2023; Varga et al., 2023). Studies have suggested that Growth
Hacking bridges strategy formulation—including strategic decisions
driving growth in a certain direction or toward a given target—and
strategy implementation, i.e., the actions undertaken to enact those
decisions (Bargoni et al., 2024b). Therefore, creating structures dedi-
cated to Growth Hacking is crucial for enabling the enactment of a
venture’s growth strategy and to enhance individual agency in its
implementation.
In summary, although prior studies have examined the entrepre-
neurial experimentation process and individual experiences, little is
known about how experimentation-based methods like Growth Hacking
are structured within organizations, particularly in the context of
scaling. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of how specic organi-
zational structures—such as governance, standardized processes, roles
and responsibilities, and resource allocation—can support the integra-
tion of experimentation and drive strategy enactment is essential for
organizations, especially new ventures. Addressing these gaps is crucial
not only for advancing theoretical insights but also for providing prac-
tical guidance to organizations navigating the complexities of growth.
Based on these considerations, this study investigates how organizations
can integrate experimentation-based approaches, such as Growth
Hacking, into their organizational structure.
3. Method
The scarcity of existing research on the organizational structuration
of experimentation, especially Growth Hacking, makes the case study
approach particularly suitable for this research (Eisenhardt &Graebner,
2007). Specically, this study employs a comparative case study design
(Eisenhardt, 2021) to analyze two digital ventures (e.g., McDonald and
Gao, 2019). This approach allows to balance an in-depth examination of
each case with the opportunities for comparison of multiple-case studies
(Eisenhardt, 1991, 2021).
At the time of investigation, the ventures were growing rapidly and
facing a similar moment of their lifecycle, maximizing comparability.
These characteristics made the ventures ideal for observing how they
organized around the implementation of Growth Hacking when rapidly
scaling. Both ventures had just received Series B equity funding from VC
investors—a proxy for venture quality and the beginning of the scaling
process (Eisenmann, 2021). Following the capital injection from the
Series B round, the ventures were preparing for scaling (Van Lancker
et al., 2023) and beginning to internationalize (Tippmann et al., 2023).
At the start of the scaling process, the ventures decided to employ
Growth Hacking as a method to scale their user base, restructure their
organizations accordingly, and sought the support of external consul-
tants specialized in Growth Hacking.
Hence, this study focuses on the similarities and differences in the
implementation of Growth Hacking within a venture’s organizational
structure. The investigation is based on primary data collected through
two rounds of interviews with key informants, including venture foun-
ders, managers, employees, and external consultants who supported the
ventures in implementing the approach. The primary data collected are
supplemented by secondary sources provided by the informants or
gathered independently. This study is part of a broader project con-
ducted by the author over several years, examining experimentation in
new and established organizations.
The current study examines two of the organizations, enriched with
additional data collection to deepen the understanding of Growth
Hacking and its organizational implementation within the ventures. For
condentiality reasons, the two cases are presented under the pseudo-
nyms of Gimli and Legolas.
3.1. Case selection
The selection of the ventures followed a three-step process. Given the
challenge of determining upfront whether startups use Growth Hacking
and whether they would restructure their organization for its imple-
mentation, in January 2019, I consulted with three highly experienced
Growth Hacking consultants. These consultants had worked with
numerous digital ventures across various industries in Italy, supporting
them through their scaling process, advising on Growth Hacking stra-
tegies, and overseeing their integration within organizations. Addi-
tionally, two of the three consultants have authored books on Growth
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
3
Hacking, documenting their extensive experience with scaling ventures
and the practical application of Growth Hacking within organizations.
Given their expertise, I consulted them to identify the most represen-
tative ventures for observing the implementation of Growth Hacking
during the scaling process.
Based on their recommendations, I identied six digital ventures and
conducted preliminary interviews with the founders. I prioritized ven-
tures that had reached Series B funding, a key indicator of entering the
scaling phase, where Growth Hacking becomes particularly important
for driving growth (Eisenmann, 2021). I also focused on ventures that
were actively restructuring their internal organization to embed Growth
Hacking as a core component of their growth strategy. This included
changes such as team restructuring, resource reallocation, and the
formalization of Growth Hacking practices within their operations.
Lastly, I considered the size of the ventures, selecting those with be-
tween 30 and 100 employees, as this range allowed for the observation
of Growth Hacking implementation in ventures of sufcient dimension
to observe organizational changes within the venture.
Based on these criteria, four ventures were excluded as they did not
align with the study’s focus: they were either too small or had not yet
structured their organization to fully implement Growth Hacking for
scaling. Ultimately, only two of the ventures—Gimli and Legolas—made
signicant organizational changes to integrate Growth Hacking, making
them the focus of this study.
The choice of these two ventures allowed for a deeper exploration of
Growth Hacking implementation within an organization, while also
incorporating the consultants’expert perspectives on its organizational
integration and potential for generalizability. By comparing the
different approaches taken by each venture, the study provides insights
into how Growth Hacking can be embedded within a venture’s growing
organizational structure. Observing two cases also ensured the depth
typical of single-case studies (Siggelkow, 2007), while enabling the
comparison opportunities offered by multiple-case designs (Eisenhardt,
1991). In this sense, adopting a “matched pair”research design
(Eisenhardt, 2021) reected the necessity of observing cases with a
common antecedent—in this case, the decision to scale and implement
Growth Hacking within their organization—and allowed for the com-
parison of different possible outcomes.
3.2. Research context
Both ventures operate in the ntech industry, which has experienced
rapid growth, supported by substantial equity investments from venture
capital (VC) funds that provide signicant opportunities for ventures
operating in this domain (Gauthier et al., 2020). In Europe, ntech ranks
as one of the top industries for producing scaleups, second only to
biotech (Gauthier et al., 2023), driven by ntech ventures’ability to
secure large Series B funding rounds (Gauthier et al., 2022)—a key in-
dicator of ventures preparing to scale (Eisenmann, 2021; Gauthier et al.,
2023). Fintech ventures not only rank high in terms of funding but also
in exit values, averaging $400 million per exit in 2022, outperforming
many traditional industries (Gauthier et al., 2023), especially when
compared to more resource-intensive industries like manufacturing,
retail, or transportation. These dynamics make ntech a compelling
industry for observing the organizational implementation of Growth
Hacking as ventures scale up and structure their organization (Greiner,
1998).
The two ventures examined in this study, Gimli and Legolas, were
founded about ve years prior to the time of investigation and had since
received signicant capital injections from professional investors,
reaching Series B rounds in preparation for scaling. Both ventures
operate digital platforms that provide nancial services to business
customers and consumers, thereby offering signicant opportunities for
rapid customer base growth. At the time of investigation, both ventures
were ready to leverage the capital raised to prepare for scaling.
Founded in Italy, Gimli and Legolas decided to internationalize to
support their scaling process by expanding their operations to the UK,
one of the world’s most vibrant ntech ecosystems (Khalifa, 2021). The
UK ecosystem is the highest-valued ecosystem in Europe in terms of VC
investments, with London ranking as the world’s second-largest startup
ecosystem. Between 2021 and 2023, London-based ventures raised $510
billion in venture capital (Gauthier et al., 2024), supported by a network
of over 1,370 VC rms and an increasing number of unicorns each year
(Gauthier et al., 2023).
Consistent with literature that identies Growth Hacking as a key
method for ventures scaling internationally (Holiday, 2014;Bargoni
et al., 2024a), this context suited the investigation of Growth Hacking in
scaling ventures particularly well. Based on these considerations, setting
this research within the ntech domain and observing these ventures as
they expanded into one of the world’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial
ecosystems provided a unique opportunity for in-depth analysis of
Growth Hacking implementation in an extreme context.
Gimli’s core business is providing businesses with prepaid cards for
corporate expenses. The venture has been operational since 2015 and, at
the time of investigation, had received Series B funding, which triggered
a process of scaling, accompanied by organizational restructuring and
internationalization. This enabled Gimli to expand to 100 employees
within one year and signicantly grow its customer base. Legolas, a B2C
digital wallet provider, was founded in 2016 and similarly received
Series B funding, which led to a process of scaling and internationali-
zation. As it scaled, Legolas employed around 40 employees and was
later acquired by a private equity fund for an undisclosed amount.
With the guidance of the specialized external consultants, both
ventures implemented Growth Hacking to increase their customer
base—the primary goal of scaling—while seeking to balance customer
acquisition potential with limited resource commitments (Huang et al.,
2017). To ensure the entire team was aligned with their growth objec-
tives, both ventures structured their organizations to embed Growth
Hacking into daily operations. This setting provided a relevant and rich
context for investigating the organizational dynamics behind the
implementation of Growth Hacking in fast-growing ntech ventures,
offering insights not only from the ventures themselves but also from the
external consultants involved in the process.
3.3. Data collection
To address the research question, the data collection process
involved multiple sources of information, including a series of semi-
structured interviews with selected informants, informal conversa-
tions, public presentations, and additional case data gathered from
secondary sources (Yin, 2014). This approach ensured data triangula-
tion and helped mitigate observer and recollection biases.
The two ventures had decided to approach scaling and implement
Growth Hacking within their organizations one year prior to the start of
data collection. Before conducting the semi-structured interviews, I
began gathering information about the cases from secondary sources to
reduce the risk of bias introduced by the informants’personal opinions.
The case studies were built from twenty-two semi-structured interviews
with key informants (Aguinis &Solarino, 2019)—including the ven-
tures’founders, managers, and employees who were involved in Growth
Hacking. External consultants were also interviewed to supplement the
perspectives of founders, managers and employees. Their views helped
to generalize the ndings, drawing on their experience across multiple
ventures.
The interviews focused on how the ventures were structured, why
they decided to use Growth Hacking, who was responsible for con-
ducting Growth Hacking experiments, and how these experiments were
deployed within their organization. The interviews with external con-
sultants were instrumental in understanding how organizing took place
around the Growth Hacking method and the organizational choices
made for its implementation. Appendix A offers an overview of the
questions that guided the semi-structured interviews in each round.
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
4
The interviews were conducted over two rounds, held between
March 2019 and September 2020. The data gathering process concluded
when no new insights were gained from additional interviews, achieving
theoretical saturation (Strauss &Corbin, 1998). The semi-structured
interviews were supplemented by informal conversations and email
exchanges to coordinate the meetings and, where necessary, clarify re-
sponses given during the interviews. In some cases, I followed up with
the informants to explore specic aspects of Growth Hacking imple-
mentation in greater depth.
To enhance robustness and mitigate potential biases, I continually
complemented the data from interviews with secondary sources
throughout the research process —from before the rst round of in-
terviews (early 2019) through to 2021. Secondary data sources included
public and closed-door presentations by the informants and other ven-
ture members, public and internal reports, public interviews (e.g., video
interviews, podcasts featuring the informants), websites, and other re-
ports produced by and about the ventures during and after scaling. This
triangulation ensured a balanced and comprehensive understanding of
Growth Hacking implementation and its outcomes. Table 1 provides a
detailed overview of the sources of information used in the data
collection process.
3.4. Data analysis
Each interview was recorded and transcribed, and so were the
secondary-data sources that allowed for it (e.g., audio sources, videos).
The transcripts and textual information were analyzed by interpreting
the informants’statements by performing axial coding on the transcripts
(Strauss &Corbin, 1998). The aim of this analysis was to identify
common themes within the data from both cases and compare their
different outcomes (Eisenhardt, 2021). Although this task should be
performed starting from a clean slate, it is virtually impossible to
interpret results with no preconception of related theoretical concepts
(Eisenhardt et al., 2016).
Once coded, I organized the data collected into a table (Cloutier &
Ravasi, 2021), structuring the table by themes (rows) and by case
(columns) to facilitate comparison. Following Eisenhardt (1989, 2021), I
compared the two cases looking for similarities and differences in the
ndings, so as to identify patterns and differences. This way, I could
draw a precise picture of the different congurational elements that
characterize each of the ventures’organizational structure in imple-
menting Growth Hacking. The following sections follow a conceptual
composition (Berends &Deken, 2021) to illustrate the ndings of this
study based on the main analytical dimensions that emerged from the
data.
4. Findings
This study’s ndings shed light on how new ventures implement
Growth Hacking into their organizational structure. By analyzing the
similarities and differences between the two cases—Gimli and Lego-
las—this research uncovers the key elements underlying the organiza-
tional choices ventures make to structure experimentation within their
organization. In particular, the ndings illustrate the ventures’choices
in terms of governance structures, roles and responsibilities, process
standardization, and resource allocation, and how they support strategy
enactment and enhance individual agency. The ndings reveal two
distinct approaches to implementing experimentation within an orga-
nization, which are characterized by emerging differences in: (i) the
organizational conguration adopted, (ii) the structure of marketing
and product units, (iii) the key roles, representing people responsible for
Growth Hacking within the organization, (iv) the governance of exper-
imentation activities, and (v) the respective benets and shortcomings
of each approach. Considering these dimensions, the following sections
explore the similarities and differences between the bridging and
permeating approaches to the organizational implementation of Growth
Hacking (summarized in Table 2).
4.1. Organizational conguration
Gimli is the larger of the two ventures, reaching 100 employees
throughout its scaling process. The organization grew organically since
its foundation, specializing within separate organizational units dedi-
cated to a specic function—i.e., Marketing, Product, After-sales, and
Legal—and thereby organized following a relatively traditional func-
tional organizational structure. Even when setting out to scale and
implementing Growth Hacking, Gimli decided to maintain its functional
organizational conguration.
Gimli’smanagement, with support from consultants, was seeking to
introduce Growth Hacking as an engine for growth without sacricing
the synergies and efciencies of having its employees specialize and
collaborate with other subject experts within dedicated functional
teams. To combine this logic with their efforts toward growing the
venture, Gimli established a dedicated Growth unit as soon as it set out to
scale. The Growth unit reported directly to the C-level and was placed
alongside the other organizational functions. Its task was to orchestrate
Growth Hacking experiments to grow the customer base through new
customer acquisition, as well as the activation, retention, and better
monetization of existing customers. As Gimli’s CEO explained:
“Our organization is becoming more and more established. As we grow in
size and employees, we are developing a bit of inertia, and we need to start
pushing the accelerator on growth while also remaining efcient in what
we do in the day-to-day.”
Thus, growth efforts would not directly impact the venture’s day-to-
day activities, which needed to ensure service continuity and efciency
for core business customers. Instead, with the establishment of a dedi-
cated Growth unit, Gimli assigned growth responsibilities to a dedicated
Table 1
Sources of data.
Source Data collected Use in the analysis
Semi-structured
interviews
22 semi-structured interviews with key informants from Gimli and
Legolas (i.e., founders, managers, employees, expert consultants involved
in Growth Hacking)
Interviews were the primary source of data for the study, employed to gather
information about how the ventures structured their organization for implementing
Growth Hacking.
Informal
communication
13 informal conversations
31 email exchanges
Informal communication with the informants served as a means of coordination and
validation for the interpretation of the data collected through interviews and
secondary sources.
Secondary sources 6 presentations (e.g., lectures, networking events)
4 internal documents
18 news articles
5 podcast episodes
11 online videos
2 ofcial websites
8 nancial statements
2x funding information
Secondary-source information was employed to triangulate the information
gathered from the primary sources and gather additional information about the
evolution of the cases over time.
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
5
team tasked with charting the venture’s growth direction and pursuing
growth objectives for the entire organization.
Legolas, by contrast, decided to restructure its organization, which
was previously informal and had undened hierarchies and spontaneous
cross-functional collaborations, with the help of a specialized Growth
Hacking consultant. The restructuring followed a matrix organizational
conguration based on two dimensions. Legolas’s management decided
to preserve the functional teams—Marketing and Support, Product
Design, Front-end Development, and Back-end Development—while
also establishing three cross-functional teams focused on customer
lifecycle phases and product complexity: (i) customer onboarding and
acquisition, (ii) the existing online platform, and (iii) the newly
launched banking product. Each team included members from Market-
ing, Design, Back-end, and Front-end Development, who reported to
both their functional leader and their cross-functional team. As Legolas’s
CEO noted:
“We have a very distributed structure. However, having one expert in each
team enables them to have all the knowledge they need to deploy the
needed experiments.”
This approach allowed Legolas to better accommodate its need for
high exibility and product expertise, while also aligning all employees
with the venture’s growth goals, increasing their individual account-
ability, and supporting a distributed agency over the execution of the
growth strategy.
Organizing in cross-functional teams was driven by the need to (i)
grow the customer base, requiring a cross-functional team dedicated to
acquisition and activation, and (ii) divide efforts between established
and new products that could attract new customers. By matching
specialization in a customer lifecycle phase or product with functional
expertise, Legolas’s employees could delve deeply into growth drivers in
their specic areas and maintain full control and agency over their
processes.
Although congured differently, both cases highlight how these
ventures organized to scale, choosing approaches that best achieved
their growth objectives. Gimli maintained its functional structure while
adding a dedicated Growth Team, whereas Legolas restructured the or-
ganization entirely to ensure everyone was aligned with growth goals
and give the entire organization agency to work toward attaining them.
4.2. Structure of marketing and product units
The organizational restructuring in both ventures was focused on
customer base growth. Accordingly, both ventures prioritized the roles
of Marketing and Product unit employees. More specically, given that
Marketing and Product employees play an important part in, respec-
tively, gathering insights from the market and translating potential
changes into the product offered by the venture, both Gimli and Legolas
centered their organizational design choices about how these teams and
their members would interact with each other and how they would
relate to the venture’s growth objectives.
With Gimli’schoice to adopt a functional organizational congura-
tion,Marketing and Product are distinct functional units within the
organization. To support higher specialization in target customer
groups, the Marketing unit is organized as a matrix. On the one hand, the
unit is structured by businesses segment (i.e., small businesses, mid-
market, and large enterprises). On the other hand, members are dedi-
cated to a specic stage of the customer’s lifecycle: customer acquis-
ition—i.e., the rst contact with the customer and their onboarding
through the purchase of the product—and customer activation—i.e., the
actual use of the product by the user once it has been acquired. The
customer acquisition team is further split into online and ofine
customer acquisition, reecting the online and ofine channels that
Gimli uses to reach and onboard new customers. Meanwhile, Gimli’s
Product unit encompasses both back-end and front-end developers
working collectively on both desktop and mobile platforms, as well as
back-end infrastructure.
At the time of investigation, Gimli’s Marketing unit was working with
an external consulting company to better dene roles and re-
sponsibilities within Marketing and support the creation of the Growth
unit. Thus, Gimli established the dedicated Growth unit as a bridge
Table 2
Key characteristics of the two approaches to the organizational implementation
of Growth Hacking.
Approach Bridging Permeating
Organizational
conguration
Functional conguration,
organized around
organizational functions (e.
g., Marketing, After-sales,
Product, Legal)
Matrix conguration,
organized in cross-functional
teams dedicated to different
products or features;
members of the team also
report to their functional
chief (e.g., Chief Marketing
Ofcer)
Structure of
marketing and
product units
The organizational functions
of Marketing and Product are
linked through a specialized
Growth unit, which holds
both accountable for the
activities needed to reach the
venture’s growth objectives
Representatives of the
Marketing and Product units
co-exist and collaborate
within cross-functional teams
and hold the entire team
accountable for reaching the
venture’s growth objectives
Key roles Growth Manager, in charge
of the Growth unit, is
accountable for the
attainment of the venture’s
growth objectives by
coordinating Marketing and
Product employees
Marketing representatives
are accountable for reaching
growth objectives. They are
embedded within cross-
functional teams composed
of back-end developers,
front-end developers, and
product designers
Governance of
experimentation
Top-down approach to
experimentation. The
Growth unit orchestrates
experiments and is
responsible for translating
data gathered by Marketing
into decisions for the Product
team, acting as a bridge
between the two functions;
specic experiments are
suggested by Marketing or
the C-level and coordinated
by the Growth unit
Bottom-up approach to
experimentation. Marketing
representatives within each
cross-functional team carry
out experiments and
permeate the insights coming
from the experiments to the
rest of the cross-functional
team (e.g., developers) using
their results to make
decisions about the product
Benets •Facilitate ow of
information between
Marketing and Product
•Exploit economies of scale
of a functional
organizational structure
•“Plug-and-play”solution
that facilitates
implementation
•Clear responsibility for
experiments and
implementation of their
result
•Strong autonomy,
accountability, and
authority over the
experimentation process
•Enhanced control over
strategy enactment with a
single point of contact
•Easy and rapid
coordination between
Marketing and the rest of
the team, especially
Product
•Allows quick integration of
market insights into the
product
•Enhanced individual
agency for the attainment
of strategy
•Increased informality and
job enlargement for
Marketing representatives,
leading to better
acceptance of
organizational changes
and higher commitment to
experimentation activities
Shortcomings •Creation of an additional
layer of intermediation
that could introduce
process inertia and
complexity
•Possible authority and
acceptance issues,
especially when
introducing new hires
•Capital-intensive and
higher risk
•Possible duplication of
efforts and inefciencies
from the replication of the
functional structure and
the experiments
•May encumber alignment
between cross-functional
teams
•Difcult setup due to the
need of organizational
restructuring
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
6
between the Product unit and the Marketing teams focused on online
and ofine customer acquisition and activation. As explained by their
CMO:
“We felt the need to increase the emphasis we placed on Growth within the
organization, by establishing a dedicated unit that complements our
existing organizational units and can focus on growing.”
In summary, Gimli decided to establish the Growth unit to meet an
emerging need for growth and to enhance accountability for the ven-
ture’s growth objectives. With a complex Marketing unit designed to
guarantee customer orientation and strong connection with the market
and a cohesive Product unit, Gimli maintained the structures, roles and
responsibilities of both units while bridging them through the Growth
Team, which also holds them accountable for the attainment of growth
objectives.
Legolas, instead, invested in the close collaboration of Marketing and
Product experts embedded within cross-functional teams. Every cross-
functional team consists of a Marketing employee responsible for col-
lecting customer data and suggesting product or customer acquisition
experiments, a front-end developer, a back-end developer, and a product
designer, who collaborate on developing and modifying the product and
its features. Consequently, Legolas’s Marketing and Product departments
were distributed across the different cross-functional teams and worked
jointly to attain the growth objectives set by the management. As the
Customer Acquisition Manager (part of Marketing) at Legolas explained,
“Each of the teams is very heterogeneous. This allows us to combine our
competencies in the best possible way, ensuring the dialogue is always
open. At the same time, we ensure each of us has a full overview on what
the customers are going through, as well as their pain points.”
Legolas also collaborated extensively with two external consultants
specializing in Growth Hacking, who supported them in dening the
matrix structure, emphasizing customer acquisition and activation, and
training employees about the Growth Hacking method, its governance,
and implementation.
4.3. Key roles
Both ventures appointed a specic set of people to play a pivotal role
in the organizational implementation of Growth Hacking. In Gimli, the
organizational structure was enriched with a Growth Manager, in charge
of overseeing all Growth Hacking activities and managing a small team
of two people. Gimli hired the Growth Manager from outside the ven-
ture. The selection focused on someone who had developed experience
in experimentation in other digital new ventures and could thus transfer
some of that expertise to Gimli. The Growth Manager was hired with the
mandate to create a small team by hiring junior resources and estab-
lishing the Growth unit.
Gimli’s Growth Manager was tasked with transferring information
between the Marketing and Product units and was given full re-
sponsibility for the Growth Hacking process within the venture. The
Growth Manager’s main objective was to gather insights coming from
other units, especially from Product, and convey them to Marketing,
which would design and execute experiments based on them, and vice
versa. In the words of the Growth Manager,
“I am the point of contact between the Marketing and Product teams. My
job is to make sure all insights coming from product usage are addressed to
the Marketing team, so that they can do something about it.”
The Growth Manager and team mediated communication between
Marketing and Product regarding the experiments and make sure that
the insights gathered by Marketing were acted on and integrated into the
end product by Product. The junior members of the Growth unit sup-
ported the Growth Manager in experiment administration, sometimes in
collaboration with Marketing specialists, and analyzing the data
collected. This way, the Growth Manager and team exerted agency over
Growth Hacking at Gimli, being directly responsible for enacting Gimli’s
growth strategy and accountable for meeting the venture’s growth
objectives.
In Legolas, on the other hand, the Marketing representatives were
integrated within each cross-functional team and had similar compe-
tences and responsibilities regarding experimentation. Within their
cross-functional team, the Marketing experts carried out experiments on
different phases of the customer lifecycle and different product features,
ensuring that the scaling potential of each product is fully exploited. As
one of the consultants who supported Legolas in implementing Growth
Hacking reported,
“If the venture is small, everyone has to do a bit of everything. So, the
‘Growth master’has to get down to operations and be hybrid, instead of
having a mere strategic role.”
In fact, Marketing experts in Legolas wore two different hats: on one
hand, they followed day-to-day operations, while on the other, they led
experiments aimed at growth objectives. Thanks to this dual role, the
Marketing experts in each team could exert agency over the Growth
Hacking process within smaller, more manageable cross-functional
teams. This role helped ensure that each team contributed to enacting
Legolas’s growth strategy and achieving its growth objectives. Addi-
tionally, the other members of cross-functional teams (e.g., back-end
and front-end developers) were awarded signicant individual agency
in enacting the Growth Hacking process, making Legolas particularly
exible in facilitating communication between experts in different
areas.
4.4. Governance of experimentation
These organizational choices led the two ventures to develop very
different ways of structuring Growth Hacking within their organization,
although both were aimed at ensuring the effective enactment of the
venture’s strategy and enhancing individual agency. Given their inde-
pendence from the Marketing and Product units within Gimli’s func-
tional organizational conguration, the Growth team had signicant
autonomy, authority, and accountability in terms of growth objectives.
In governing the experimentation process, the Growth team’s auton-
omy, authority and accountability allowed it to play a coordinating role
between Marketing and Product and exert signicant agency over the
Growth Hacking process. In this sense, the Growth Manager and team
orchestrated experimentation, collaborating with Marketing to identify
appropriate experiments to grow the customer base, monitoring and
executing them, and ultimately translating the data gathered by Mar-
keting into actionable product decisions for Product to implement.
Initially, most acquisition and activation efforts were devoted to the
small business market segment. In particular, the venture recognized
that this customer type is especially responsive to online marketing and
can make decisions quickly without complex corporate processes
requiring direct sales interaction. Activating customers also took less
time, enabling the venture to experiment more with this customer type.
Thus, Gimli’s Marketing unit found that smaller businesses were less
affected by unsuccessful experiments. Consequently, most experiments
at Gimli focused on acquiring and activating small business customers.
Gimli’s Growth unit was a key contributor in the creation of experi-
ments for customer acquisition and activation, suggesting tools and
timing for their execution and then analyzing the results with Market-
ing, before passing them over to Product for actionable changes. Within
Marketing, experiments were often initiated by the Head of Acquisition,
when they involved minor adjustments to the onboarding experience.
Higher-risk experiments, such as those affecting the venture’s business
model (e.g., launch of new products), might come from the venture’s C-
level—e.g., the CMO or even the CEO. These experiments required
greater effort and the collaboration of both Marketing and Product,
while being coordinated by Growth. The external consultants in Growth
Hacking were deeply involved in the process, working closely with
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
7
Gimli’s Growth unit to develop an experimentation roadmap aimed at
meeting growth targets. As Gimli’sCMO highlighted,
“Every decision we make rst needs to go through an experiment. We base
all our decision-making on market feedback.”
In general,experiments at Gimli were conducted without a rigid
protocol. Many experiments involved short tests related to acquisition
and activation strategies, such as A/B tests on the platform. These ex-
periments were supervised by the Growth Manager, administered
directly by the Acquisition team, and lasted only for a few weeks. More
signicant experiments, such as changes or expansions to the core of-
fering, were typically led by the CMO and coordinated by the Growth
Manager. These experiments often required monitoring results over
several consecutive months or at different times of the year.
The Growth Manager was accountable for reaching growth targets,
thus ensuring that the Growth unit’s incentives were aligned with the
venture’s needs and expectations. To achieve these goals, Gimli’s
Growth unit maintained constant contact with Product, Sales, and After-
sales teams, gathering insights from them and designing tests that could
address actual customer needs. In this role, Gimli’s Growth unit served as
a bridge between the rest of the organization and the teams dedicated to
expanding the customer base, ensuring alignment with the venture’s
strategy and core values and effectively steering strategy enactment to
drive growth.
In Legolas, instead, the representatives of Marketing within each
cross-functional team were entirely responsible for identifying and
conducting experiments. After gathering experiment results, they
analyzed the data and shared insights with the rest of the cross-
functional team for potential action. These insights informed decision-
making about product adjustments. For example, an experiment might
involve A/B testing on different landing page layout. When the A/B test
data showed that one layout outperformed the other in customer
acquisition, the Marketing expert consulted with the cross-functional
team to implement changes on the landing page to improve customer
acquisition rates.
Compared to Gimli,Legolas embedded experimentation more uidly
within the organization through a more informal experimentation pro-
cess. Each cross-functional team had a Marketing representative, with
full agency over Growth Hacking experiments, eliminating the need for
C-level authorization. The cross-functional teams were accountable for
meeting a 5-year strategic and product roadmap dened by the C-level.
Within this roadmap, each team independently conceived and priori-
tized experiments related to different aspects of the product or customer
acquisition process. Coordinated by Marketing experts, the cross-
functional teams designed and executed several experiments aimed at
growing the customer base. As explained by a consultant who collabo-
rated with Legolas on Growth Hacking implementation,
“A common misconception of Growth Hacking is the necessity to identify
one main element, the so-called ’Growth Hack’, that is able to trigger
exponential growth, but this happens once in a while and in very peculiar
cases. In reality, growth derives from a combination of many small-scale
increases in the user base, a combination of minor experiments that show
positive results.”
By gathering data and observing user behaviors, each Marketing
representative proposed tests to their cross-functional team. Once a set
of experiments was identied, the Marketing representative prioritized
them based on which experiments were more likely to yield signicant
results, drawing on historical data from previous experiments. This
process allowed the Marketing representative to create an experimen-
tation roadmap to share with the rest of the cross-functional team. After
agreeing on the roadmap, the team executed the experiments and
evaluated the outcomes to gather performance data.
Most experiments at Legolas were conducted in two-week sprints,
allowing each team to structure its workow around these iterative
cycles. However, the duration and nature of experiments varied based
on their scope: simpler experiments could be concluded in as little as
three days, while more complex experiments could span up to four
sprints. As a Customer Acquisition Specialist explained,
“In my team, we sometimes test different landing page layouts to see if
they make a difference, or run bigger tests. (…) We once tried adding
videos where users could understand how the mobile app worked, and we
saw it increased conversion to activation by 10 %.”
This exibility in running diverse types of experiments enhanced the
Marketing experts’individual agency over experimentation, enabling
them to tailor their approach based on the experiments’scope and
impact. This adaptability also suited the informal and low-hierarchy
approach Legolas took in implementing Growth Hacking, which affor-
ded the venture signicant exibility in deploying experiments to ach-
ieve growth objectives.
In summary, both Gimli and Legolas established clear and dened
governance structures for experimentation, either by creating a dedi-
cated Growth unit to oversee experiments, or by embedding trained
employees within cross-functional teams. Those responsible for experi-
mentation gathered data from functional experts, coordinated relevant
experiments, and contributed to the venture’s growth efforts. Both
ventures appointed a dedicated team to manage experimentation, ful-
lling an infrastructural role within the organization. This structuring of
experimentation provided clear roles and responsibilities, ensuring
accountability for enacting the venture’s growth strategy and enhancing
individual agency in the experimentation process. As a consultant
working with Gimli on organizational structuration noted,
“Bigger startups can dedicate resources full time and have people focused
on experimentation all day.”
Indeed, Gimli was able to hire a Growth Manager and dedicate re-
sources exclusively to growth-oriented experimentation. In contrast,
Legolas, with a smaller and leaner structure, could not afford a team
solely focused on experimentation. To streamline the process from
market information to product adjustments, Legolas opted to permeate
Growth Hacking experts throughout the organization in a distributed
model.
4.5. Benets and shortcomings
Although both ventures established clear governance of the experi-
mentation process, this study’s ndings have shown that their respective
approaches to the implementation of Growth Hacking within the orga-
nization differ in terms of choices in organizational conguration,
structure of marketing and product units, key roles, and governance of
the experimentation activities. Given these differences, the two different
approaches have distinct benets that allow the ventures to fully
leverage their specicities, while also carrying specic shortcomings.
On the one hand, Gimli’sbridging approach to implementing Growth
Hacking within the organizational structure allowed the venture to
centralize experimentation efforts and make communication between
Marketing and Product units more efcient. The presence of a dedicated
Growth unit facilitates the ow of information between Marketing and
Product, better conveying the market insights gathered by the different
teams from Marketing—spanning online and ofine customer acquisi-
tion, activation, and retention—into Product. In this way, Gimli also took
advantage of the economies of scale inherent in a functional organiza-
tional structure, where specialized teams can easily and quickly coor-
dinate during day-to-day activities, while a dedicated team—i.e., the
Growth Manager and team—takes responsibility for orchestrating and
conducting essential experiments to drive the venture’s growth. In this
sense, the establishment of the Growth team provided its members with
the authority, autonomy, and accountability needed to govern experi-
mentation activities, ensuring proper enactment of Gimli’s growth
strategy. For example, giving the Growth unit full agency over the
deployment of the experiments increased the likelihood that
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
8
experiments would be conducted rigorously and that their results will be
integrated into the product.
Another advantage of the bridging approach is that it is immediately
accessible to the organization, like a ‘plug-and-play’option. Given
Gimli’s size of 100 employees, it was easier for management to create a
new unit within the existing organizational conguration than to
restructure the entire organization in pursuit of growth. Adding a new
unit could be accomplished without a full reorganization, especially
when external hires, such as Gimli’s Growth Manager and team, are
brought in without impacting the existing structure or employees.
However, establishing a specialized bridging unit focused on experi-
mentation, as embodied by Gimli’s Growth unit, inevitably creates an
additional layer of intermediation between Marketing and Product
units. Besides its advantages, as highlighted above, the presence of an
intermediary could slow communication related to experimentation,
limit the implementation of learnings within the end product, and in-
crease coordination costs between different units. Units might also resist
following directions provided by a new organizational unit and, in cases
involving external hires as with Gimli, new members of the organization.
Indeed, this could lead existing employees to feel that the change is
imposed “top down”rather than helping them align to the venture’s
growth strategy. Finally, establishing a new unit through external hires,
depending on its size, requires a signicant capital commitment and can
involve a tradeoff between increasing the venture’s customer base and
the investment needed to do so.
On the other hand, Legolas’s choice to permeate the Growth Hacking
approach and experimentation within each cross-functional team
offered the venture the opportunity to achieve seamless coordination
between Marketing experts and experts in other domains, such as
product developers and designers. This close connection allows the
venture to swiftly gather insights from the market and integrate them
into the product with minimal organizational friction, making experi-
mentation highly embedded within the organizational structure and
culture and promoting the use of experimentation as a mindset rather
than purely as a process. As a Product Manager at Legolas explained,
“If the experiments conducted by Marketing do not return positive results,
the feedback comes immediately back to the team and to the experts in
Product”.
In contrast to the bridging approach, the permeating approach pro-
motes a “bottom up”attitude toward implementing Growth Hacking,
enhancing Marketing employees’agency over enacting the venture’s
growth strategy and ensuring high exibility to capture growth oppor-
tunities identied through direct contact with the market. This informal
structure also encourages higher employee engagement in Growth
Hacking activities, possibly leading to a better overall experience
despite signicant organizational changes and the challenges that
characterize the scaling process. As an expert Growth Hacking consul-
tant supporting Legolas noted,
“[Legolas]’s core strength is the ability to immediately capture new
customer needs or x what is not working. Everybody is very
engaged and enjoying this moment of high ‘elasticity’in terms of
what you can experiment with.”
Yet, despite the benet of high speed, exibility, and increased in-
dividual agency over the experimentation process, having multiple
people conduct similar and independent tasks in parallel results in a
multiplication of efforts devoted to experimentation. This can hinder
alignment between teams and lead to redundant experiments, making it
harder to leverage knowledge generated by other teams. Additionally,
increased individual agency and accountability in the permeating
approach might overload certain individuals who have multiple roles in
the organization, balancing day-to-day responsibilities with account-
ability for experimentation and growth efforts.
Another potential disadvantage of the permeating approach is its
relation to venture size. Legolas restructured to adopt a permeating
approach to Growth Hacking when the venture was still relatively small.
Larger ventures like Gimli might nd it difcult to completely restruc-
ture around cross-functional teams, resulting in longer setup times to
establish teams in the new conguration. As Gimli’s experience dem-
onstrates, larger ventures might favor a “plug-and-play”approach, such
as a dedicated experimentation unit that can be introduced into the
existing organizational structure.
The two cases illustrate two distinct approaches to implementing
Growth Hacking within an organization (see Fig. 1 for a visual summary)
to support organizational structuration in favor of the enactment of the
ventures’growth strategy and the denition of individual agency in this
process. Although both approaches show similarities and unique char-
acteristics in their organizational conguration, the structure of mar-
keting and product units, key roles, and governance of experimentation,
each approach has benets and shortcomings and emphasizes struc-
turing experimentation within the organization to achieve the ventures’
growth objectives. By bridging and permeating experimentation within
their organizational structure, Gimli and Legolas have developed ways of
implementing Growth Hacking within their organization—not just as a
standardized process for experimenting with how to grow their
customer base, but by making experimentation a structural component
and laying the groundwork for strategically harnessing it to grow.
5. Discussion
This study illustrates how ventures can implement Growth Hacking
within their organizational structure by following two distinct ap-
proaches: either bridging Marketing and Product units by establishing an
organizational unit dedicated to experimentation, or permeating exper-
imentation across the fabric of the organization. Specically, these
ndings highlight the key characteristics of each approach to Growth
Hacking implementation (summarized in Table 2), in terms of (i) the
choice of organizational conguration, (ii) the structure of marketing
and product units, (iii) the denition of key roles, (iv) the governance of
experimentation activities, and the respective (v) benets and short-
comings of the two approaches.
This study’s ndings connect with previous literature that identied
Growth Hacking as a means to bridge strategy formulation—in this case,
the denition of the growth strategy the venture aims to pursue—and
strategy implementation—i.e., the activities the venture undertakes to
achieve its growth objectives (Bargoni et al., 2024b)—particularly for
ventures in the critical phase of scaling (Sanasi et al., 2023). As shown in
the cases of Gimli and Legolas, both ventures were actively scaling,
having secured Series B funding and initiated the process of restruc-
turing their organizations to support customer base growth and inter-
national expansion. These cases reveal how Growth Hacking, when
embedded in the organizational structure, facilitates not only the stra-
tegic decision-making necessary for scaling but also the continuous
experimentation required to adapt to new market conditions and growth
opportunities. These ndings are consistent with previous studies,
which suggested that new ventures do not stop experimenting after
achieving product-market t (Sanasi et al., 2023) but continue to
innovate their business model to facilitate scaling (Cavallo et al., 2023).
These ndings also emphasize the role of organizational structures in
enabling strategy enactment and individual agency (Whittington, 2015),
which is crucial for ventures in the scaling phase. As ventures expand,
the cases suggest that the structuration of Growth Hacking helps ensure
that growth initiatives are aligned with the venture’s strategic objec-
tives, while also empowering employees to experiment and drive growth
through clearly dened roles and responsibilities. This reects the
principles of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), where structures act
as catalysts for the successful exercise of individual agency in strategy
implementation. Aligned with Pozzebon (2004), these ndings also
highlight the importance of structuring Growth Hacking to provide the
necessary organizational scaffolding that enables both the venture as a
whole and its individual members to navigate the complexities of
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
9
scaling, while also providing solid grounds for preventing employees’
negative experiences (Genedy et al., 2024).
Furthermore, these ndings respond to recent calls for research on
structuring experimentation within organizations (Sanasi, 2023),
demonstrating how the appropriate organizational integration of
experimentation practices, such as Growth Hacking, is critical for their
success (Bohnsack &Liesner, 2019), particularly during scaling. This
research underscores the importance of embedding Growth Hacking
into the fabric of the organization during scaling to enhance both
strategy enactment and the scalability of the venture’s operations. In
this way, the structuring of Growth Hacking within scaling ventures not
only supports strategy implementation but also ensures that the orga-
nization is equipped to grow sustainably while maintaining the exi-
bility needed to adapt to new growth challenges.
Additionally, as shown in the ndings, the different cong-
urations—bridging and permeating—have distinct characteristics with
their respective benets and shortcomings, depending on the ventures’
specic needs and approach to growth. The bridging conguration rep-
resents a more top-down approach to the implementation of Growth
Hacking, which can be implemented without extensive organizational
restructuring, while the permeating approach promotes a bottom-up
implementation that involves restructuring the venture’s entire orga-
nization. In particular, the two approaches offer different solutions for
addressing the trade-off between efciency and exibility of organiza-
tional structures that entrepreneurial ventures face, as identied in the
existing literature (Burton et al., 2019; Davis et al., 2009). This trade-off
is especially prominent in new ventures attempting to scale, which need
to retain the exibility and informality that supports an entrepreneurial
opportunity-seeking behavior, while simultaneously structuring the or-
ganization to manage growth (Cardinal et al., 2004; DeSantola &Gulati,
2017; Flamholtz &Randle, 2012).
This study’s ndings also add to previous studies that argued that the
inuence of the marketing unit on rm-level strategic decision-making
can positively impact rm performance (Wirtz et al., 2014). In fact,
although Gimli established a specic Growth unit within the organiza-
tion, the team collaborated closely with Marketing, enhancing Market-
ing’s strategic inuence over product development. Previous studies
also argued that rms should promote a market orientation within the
organization (Loveland et al., 2015), as a stronger market orientation is
correlated with improved rm performance (Wirtz et al., 2014). In this
respect, this study suggests that the integration of Growth Hacking
within the organizational structure of the ventures inherently leads
them to adopt a more market-oriented approach by basing decisions on
insights derived from prospective and existing users.
These observations are consistent with earlier research recognizing
marketing as a critical source of information to share across the orga-
nization due to its proximity to the market and ability to detect signals
directly from customers (Lovelock &Wright, 2011). Previous studies
also highlighted the importance of aligning insights from marketing and
operations units for both product and service development (e.g., Dixon
et al., 2014; Sanasi et al., 2024). Indeed, existing literature views mar-
keting capabilities as a cultural asset distributed across the organization
(Slater &Narver, 2000), fostering the cross-functional dispersion of
marketing activities (Auh &Merlo, 2012), consistent with an
activity-based approach rather than a functionally siloed view of mar-
keting (Workman et al., 1998).
Building on these considerations, these ndings support Ellis and
Brown’s (2017) claim about the importance of establishing a dedicated
Growth team within the organization. These ndings also highlight two
different ways to structure experimentation, shedding light on how to
implement Growth Hacking within the organizational structure to
bridge strategy formulation and implementation (Bargoni et al., 2024b),
and ultimately enabling strategy enactment (Whittington, 2015). In this
sense, the introduction of structure enables employee agency (Pozzebon,
2004) for the enactment of the venture’s growth strategy through
experimentation. Specically, creating a dedicated Growth unit in Gimli
created the conditions for assigning responsibility to a specic team-
—the Growth unit—to attain the venture’s growth objectives and enact
Gimli’s growth strategy through Growth Hacking. The unit also
enhanced individual agency in the experimentation process by enabling
team members to control the experiments conducted, their results, and
how the learnings were implemented into the product.
Similarly, this study’s ndings illustrate how Legolas’spermeating
approach allowed the venture to ensure that Marketing representatives
within each cross-functional team could monitor the attainment of
growth objectives and set up experiments to drive growth. This cong-
uration also enhanced employees’individual agency in the experimen-
tation process, as individual Marketing experts could direct the
experimentation roadmap and resulting decision-making while holding
team members accountable for implementing product changes. Overall,
these ndings show how the ventures’organizational structuration
around growth through either approach—helped enact their growth
strategy and enhance employees’agency over Growth Hacking experi-
ments, consistent with arguments in the literature about the role that
organizational structures play in enabling structure and agency
(Giddens, 1984; Pozzebon, 2004; Whittington, 2015).
5.1. Theoretical contributions
This study’s contribution to the existing literature is threefold. First,
Fig. 1. Two approaches to the organizational implementation of Growth Hacking.
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
10
the ndings enrich the growing literature on Growth Hacking, a method
that is increasingly popular among practitioners for business growth
(Bargoni et al., 2024a; Bargoni et al., 2024c; Santoro et al., 2024; Troisi
et al., 2020). They expand the current theoretical understanding
(Bargoni et al., 2024b) with an empirical account of two new ventures
that structured Growth Hacking within their organizations as part of
their scaling efforts. This understanding complements the existing body
of literature on Growth Hacking within new ventures (Bohnsack &
Liesner, 2019; Conway &Hemphill, 2019), particularly in the context of
scaling (Cavallo et al., 2023; Sanasi et al., 2023). By identifying two
distinct approaches—bridging and permeating—and their features, this
study provides actionable insights for organizations looking to structure
Growth Hacking and aligns with the broader understanding of organi-
zational structuration as the foundation for strategy enactment
(Whittington, 2015). Specically, these ndings identify both how to
implement Growth Hacking within a new venture as it prepares to scale,
and also highlight the benets and shortcomings of two different ap-
proaches to organizational structuration around experimentation. Thus,
this study bridges the current gaps in the understanding of how to
implement Growth Hacking within an existing and changing organiza-
tion, responding to recent calls for moving beyond the process view of
Growth Hacking often promoted by existing accounts of the approach
(Bargoni et al., 2024b).
Second, this study extends the current understanding of entrepre-
neurial experimentation (e.g., Felin &Zenger, 2009; Gans et al., 2019)
by addressing recent calls for research on structuring experimentation
within growing organizations (Sanasi, 2023) and established organiza-
tion theory (Giddens, 1984). The ndings shed light on how organiza-
tional structuration facilitates experimentation enactment and enhances
individual agency over experimentation activities (Whittington, 2015).
This study taps into the growth orientation inherent in new ventures
(Carland et al., 1984) and the organizational challenges they face in
managing it (Piaskowska et al., 2021) and establishing organizational
structures that can support growth (DeSantola &Gulati, 2017;Picken,
2017). This study advances the understanding of how experimentation
can be made structural within an organization, proposing alternative
congurations to do so and elaborating on their distinctive features.
Third, this study responds to calls for empirical research on orga-
nizing for scaling (DeSantola &Gulati, 2017; Piaskowska et al., 2021) by
providing an account of how growing new ventures might make choices
to restructure their organization to control the enactment of their
growth strategy and enhance individual agency during scaling (Van
Lancker et al., 2023). New ventures face the need to dene the division
of labor, resource allocation (Alexy et al., 2021) and coordination (Jones
&Schou, 2023) to keep pace with a growing organization (Picken,
2017), requiring them to consolidate or establish new organizational
structures (Alexy et al., 2021; Burton et al., 2019). In this context,
Growth Hacking offers a structured approach to support ventures after
reaching market validation (Sanasi et al., 2023), helping them promote
business growth (Bargoni et al., 2024b) and scaling (Bohnsack &Lies-
ner, 2019). By highlighting the bridging and permeating approaches, this
study advances the understanding of how ventures structure their or-
ganization for scaling (DeSantola &Gulati, 2017; Eisenmann &Wag-
onfeld, 2014;Van Lancker et al., 2023) and emphasizes the importance
of intentional organizational structuration. Additionally, the study
contributes to the ongoing debate on employee alignment and identi-
cation with an evolving organization (Genedy et al., 2024; Snihur &
Clarysse, 2022).
5.2. Practical implications
This study provides valuable insights for managers and entrepre-
neurs navigating the complexities of implementing experimentation-
based approaches, such as Growth Hacking, within their organiza-
tions. Specically, it offers actionable guidelines for overseeing experi-
mentation efforts aimed at implementing a growth strategy, including
customer acquisition, activation, and retention. The ndings highlight
the importance of establishing a dedicated Growth unit or appointing a
team of Growth experts within new ventures that are preparing to scale.
These roles serve as an infrastructural entity responsible for designing,
executing, and ensuring accountability for experimentation efforts
aligned with the venture’s growth targets. Finally, this study emphasizes
the signicance of organizing experimentation early in the structuration
process of a new venture, providing managers with guidance on inte-
grating it into the organizational (re)conguration of the venture to
support sustainable growth.
5.3. Limitations and future research avenues
This study is not free from limitations. First, it presents a limited
account of the possible organizational congurations that new ventures
might employ to implement Growth Hacking. Specically, the study
compares two ventures in their organizational implementation of
Growth Hacking. Although the limited number of cases analyzed
allowed for an in-depth examination of the two ventures, combining the
positives of single-case studies with the comparability afforded by
multiple-case studies (Eisenhardt, 2021; e.g., McDonald and Gao, 2019),
future studies might extend this sample to evaluate alternative cong-
urations. For example, studies could also examine ventures that expe-
rienced signicant challenges, or even failures in the implementation of
Growth Hacking at the organizational level, to produce more nuanced
results. Additionally, future research could compare the organizational
implementation of Growth Hacking with other experimentation-based
approaches, such as the Lean Startup method (Ries, 2011), at different
stages of a new venture’s lifecycle.
Second, the geographical location of the two ventures analyzed of-
fers valuable insights but could limit the generalizability of the ndings.
While the ventures expanded to a highly dynamic entrepreneurial
ecosystem and encompassed international teams, this study cannot rule
out the possibility of being affected by local market dynamics or cultural
factors. Future research could examine the differences in Growth
Hacking implementation in ventures from different countries or contexts
to explore how geographic factors might shape the organizational
structuration of experimentation-based methods. Additionally, this
research focuses on the ntech industry, particularly ventures focused
on digital solutions, which may hinder the generalizability of the nd-
ings to other industries characterized by lower exibility and slower
growth. Further research could extend this study’s ndings by investi-
gating Growth Hacking implementation in more traditional and
resource-intensive industries. Moreover, while this study focuses on
Growth Hacking during the scaling phase, the investigation of struc-
turing experimentation activities could be extended to other approaches
and different stages in a venture’s lifecycle, as well as within established
organizations.
Third, while the two organizational congurations supported suc-
cessful scaling in the cases analyzed, this study does not elaborate on the
specic performance implications of adopting either conguration. To
address this limitation, future studies could employ larger-scale samples
of organizations and quantitative research designs to evaluate the
effectiveness of each conguration on venture growth and nancial
performance, providing more detailed insights into the best contexts and
boundary conditions for each approach.
6. Conclusion
This study investigated how two new ventures integrated Growth
Hacking within their organizational structure. The ndings highlight
two distinct approaches for embedding experimentation within the
organization—either bridging experimentation or permeating it across the
organization’s structure. These approaches differ in terms of organiza-
tional conguration, the structure of marketing and product units, key
roles, governance of experimentation, and their respective benets and
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
11
shortcomings. Building on these ndings, this study addresses recent
calls for research on the implementation of Growth Hacking, the orga-
nizational structuration of experimentation, and organizing for scaling.
Moreover, it offers valuable guidelines for practitioners on how to
implement experimentation-based approaches, particularly Growth
Hacking, within new or growing organizations.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Silvia Sanasi: Writing –original draft, Writing –review &editing,
Visualization, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investi-
gation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing nancial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to inuence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
The author would like to thank the special issue Guest Editors,
especially Gabriele Santoro, and two anonymous reviewers for their
guidance and support throughout the development of this manuscript.
Appendix A. Interview Protocol
Interview round Sample questions Scope
First round •How do you use Growth Hacking within [your venture]?
•Why have you decided to use Growth Hacking within [your venture]?
•Who is in charge of Growth Hacking experiments within [your venture]?
•What is your role in the deployment of Growth Hacking?
•Who analyzes the insights coming from the experiments and how do you use them?
•How did you identify [your venture]’s organizational structure?
Understanding the use of Growth Hacking within each
venture and the reasons behind it; understanding the
governance of Growth Hacking activities; understanding the
key people in the organization for the implementation of
Growth Hacking.
Second round •How is [your venture] structured?
•How do Marketing and Product units communicate?
•Why did [your venture] decide to organize this way?
•What are the pros and cons of adopting this organizational structure for [your venture]?
•What are some specicities of your approach to Growth Hacking?
Understanding the organizational structure of each of the
ventures more in detail, identify the benets and
shortcomings of their organizational congurations.
Data availability
The data that has been used is condential.
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Silvia Sanasi is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Faculty of
Economics and Management of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and an afliate of
the Centre for Family Business Management. She received her Ph.D. from Politecnico di
Milano’s School of Management, where she is part of the extended faculty. Her research
interests encompass strategy processes and practices concerning different organizational
phenomena, including innovation, new venture creation and scaling, and strategic re-
sponses to crises.
S. Sanasi Journal of Business Research 188 (2025) 115084
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