How to scale your business and become an outlier venture

Three steps to scale up

Entrepreneurship has long been understood as a process of learning, but rather than looking at learning as an organization’s ability to ‘absorb’ information, scaling is due to an organization’s ability to ‘interpret’ information and spread that meaning across the organization to guide coordinated action.

In simple terms, outlier ventures can take trends, customer feedback, market moves, and regulatory shifts and transform them into new market offerings. In our research of three fintech scale-ups, these are the three steps taken to allow this to happen:

1 – Scoping practices: Identifying new opportunities

At the start of our investigation, each of the three fintech firms had realized that the time was ripe for scaling. While they had established product-market fit with their initial offering, they identified new opportunities to target broader user bases and pursue new market segments.

Scoping practices helped the ventures identify which trends, customer feedback, regulatory shifts, or competitive moves are relevant for scaling and which to ignore. The most successful built mechanisms at this stage to coordinate internally, share insights, and keep up with evolving trends.

2 – Interpretive practices: Sensemaking signals

Once new trends are identified, firms must interpret them – investing heavily in practices that encourage dialogue, reflection, and sensemaking. This could be collecting relevant data to support scaling efforts, implementing monitoring systems to track user behaviors, or identifying patterns relevant to customer acquisition that signal untapped or emerging needs. A/B tests proved particularly useful in selecting the most effective product configurations for our fintech’s audience.

This ability to turn scattered feedback into coordinated organizational action becomes central to a venture’s interpretive capacity. One firm created competence centers and shared repositories to centralize their learning; in others, teams were redesigned to allow knowledge sharing.

The ventures first focused on purposefully collecting data to support their scaling efforts. They implemented continuous monitoring systems to track user behaviors and identify patterns relevant to customer acquisition and retention, which could signal untapped or emerging needs. “We constantly monitor metrics from our tests, so as to get a quantitative stance on which website layouts, features, or services have the highest exploitation potential,” explained one of the firm’s marketing managers. As the CEO and co-founder of another noted, “We spend a lot of time trying to find the best channel to communicate with each segment. That’s where we often run experiments – we need to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”

Similarly, the third fintech began to formalize a more deliberate approach to experimentation. The CEO recalled: “In the beginning, we just had intuition, now we run at least one test every week to validate whether what we imagine makes sense for users.” When monitoring existing users was not possible, the ventures conducted experiments to gather information about prospective new users, and their needs and preferences, as well as to test specific features and their possible effects on users.

3 – Enabling practices: Making interpretation actionable

Interpretation only matters if it informs action. Enabling practices ensure that new insights about user behavior, trends, or product offerings are visible and utilized across the entire organization – playing a part in hiring, resource allocation, product development, and market entry decisions.

It is vital that organizations also focus on their governance of information flows and decision-making processes, building internal structures such as cross-functional teams and bridging roles that support the continuous gathering, interpretation, and diffusion of external knowledge.

At our first fintech, a functional structure separated marketing – “our antenna to the outside world,” as the CEO described it – from the product team, which held the technical and product knowledge. As communication between the two functions grew more difficult, the CEO noted, “We felt the need to hire a growth manager who acts as a bridge between marketing and product.” This new role oversaw marketing’s efforts to gather market intelligence and transfer insights to the product team. By doing so, it created accountability for the governance of interpretation, centralizing responsibility in the growth manager to ensure that insights informed decision-making at the top.

Our second firm, by contrast, adopted a matrix structure combining four functional teams: marketing and support, product design, front-end, back-end development, with three cross-functional squads: acquisition or onboarding, online platform, and new banking product. Each squad included representatives from marketing and product who collaborated to collect data, design experiments, and act on insights. This structure ensured that information could move fluidly between customer-facing and product-focused employees. As the CEO emphasized, “We built mixed teams to solve this problem – tech, marketing, and product all sit together now. Otherwise, each team had their own idea of what the user wanted.”

Our third fintech retained a more hierarchical structure, with functional teams reporting to the CEO and founder. Still, they created a growth team led by the CGO and reporting directly to the CEO to coordinate experiments and convey insights upward for strategic decisions. Across all ventures, these structural adjustments aimed to ensure effective translation of external signals into product decisions.