What is experimentation-led growth (ELG), and why does it matter now?
Experimentation-led growth (ELG) is quickly becoming a powerful concept in modern digital strategies. But while the term itself is gaining traction, few companies understand what is actually required to execute ELG at scale.
In this article, we define ELG, explain why it matters, and offer practical insights from high-performing companies that are putting it into action.
- What is experimentation-led growth (ELG)?
- Why experimentation-led growth matters
- How high-performing companies execute ELG
- The challenges to scaling experimentation
- How to get started with ELG
- ELG is the future of company-wide growth
What is experimentation-led growth (ELG)?
Experimentation-Led Growth (ELG) is a company-wide strategy that uses continuous, data-driven experimentation to unlock sustainable growth. It empowers teams in marketing, product, engineering, and data to test ideas, share insights, and act quickly toward shared outcomes.
At its core, ELG is about learning at scale rather than optimizing in isolation.
Why experimentation-led growth matters
According to Kameleoon’s 2025 Experimentation and Growth Survey, nearly 90% of high-performing companies say experimentation is critical to their success. But for many teams, experimentation still happens in silos.
In many organizations, for example:
- Marketing uses one tool for web optimization.
- Product and engineering use a separate program for feature flags.
- Data teams run analyses that are shared with higher-ups, but seldom with affected teams.
These disconnects slow teams down by creating bottlenecks, delaying decisions, and limiting the impact of what should be a powerful growth engine.
ELG addresses this by aligning people, tools, and goals around a shared culture of experimentation. Companies expecting significant growth this year are 2.5 times more likely to align product and marketing teams around a shared experimentation strategy.
These companies do not just test more. They test better, with clearer goals and better cross-team execution.
How high-performing companies execute ELG
What separates high performers from everyone else isn’t just that they run more tests—it’s that they structure experimentation differently.
- Unified platforms, not fragmented tools. Leading companies use a single platform that allows marketing, product, engineering, and data to experiment in their preferred ways, working from the same segments, KPIs, and reporting layers.
- Only 14% of high-performing companies say developers are required to run all experiments in 2025—a glowing recommendation for the strength of unified platforms and collaborating teams.
- Team-level independence with shared outcomes. Each team should be capable of building and running their own experiments, using flags, front-end code, WYSIWYG editors, or SDKs. What’s key here is that everyone aligns on the same business goals and sees how their tests affect other functions—so teams can grow together, rather than apart.
- Flexible, trusted statistical methods. From Bayesian to CUPED to sequential testing, ELG companies choose the best statistical approach for the test at hand. They don’t force one methodology on every team or use stats as a barrier.
- AI-powered acceleration. With AI tools, teams can scale experimentation safely and confidently—automating routine decisions and surfacing insights faster.
Kameleoon unifies server-side and client-side testing, letting marketers and engineers work independently but stay aligned—no bolt-ons, no duplicate setups, no reporting headaches.
The challenges to scaling experimentation
Scaling experimentation isn’t just about running more A/B tests. It’s about making experimentation the default method for how your company learns and grows. This means:
- Breaking down silos between teams
- Aligning metrics and reporting
- Reducing dependency on developers
- Enabling all teams to test independently
This is where most companies fall short. They either centralize experimentation too tightly (creating bottlenecks) or spread it too loosely (creating chaos). ELG requires balance and infrastructure—a well thought-out plan to align all teams.
How to get started with ELG
Achieving that right balance and infrastructure demands a particular approach—and mindset. Here’s how your team can move toward experimentation-led growth:
1. Audit your current tools and team setup.
Are teams collaborating? Are tools integrated? Are goals shared? Collaboration across teams is at the heart of an effective ELG strategy.
A large healthcare organization discovered that their marketing and product teams were running tests on the same patient onboarding flow, but used different tools, conflicting KPIs, and incompatible segments.
By adopting a unified experimentation platform, they ensured consistency in decision-making and dramatically reduced time spent reconciling insights across teams.
2. Choose a unified experimentation platform.
Don’t duct-tape tools together. Use a platform like Kameleoon that supports all types of experiments and all teams.
If your platform only allows your marketing team to run web experiments, while server-side, mobile, and personalization is developer or engineer-only, you set yourself up for a glacial pace down the road.
A global financial services company improved their internal efficiency by giving marketing WYSIWYG testing tools and product teams access to feature flags. Neither team had to rely on developers to move forward, and test velocity doubled in six months.
3. Invest in experimentation literacy.
Help teams understand testing methods, tradeoffs, and how to interpret results. A platform with built-in guidance, like Kameleoon’s AI Copilot, can help here.
A major fashion recently label unified their product and marketing teams' roadmaps around customer lifetime value (CLV). Product stopped optimizing only for activation; marketing stopped focusing strictly on clickthrough. Together, they drove a 17% increase in repeat purchase rate.
4. Start small, but think big.
Start making improvements where your bottlenecks are most visible, such as marketing campaigns that rely on dev cycles or product updates with no attribution. Then scale outward with a unified experimentation framework.
For example, if your product team is releasing features without knowing their impact, start by integrating feature flags with client-side KPIs.
With Kameleoon’s AI Copilot, marketers get test suggestions based on behavioral segments, product teams get rollout guardrails, and analysts get statistical insights flagged automatically—so no one’s flying blind.
ELG is the future of company-wide growth
The companies that thrive in 2025 and beyond won’t be the ones running the most tests. They’ll be the ones who make sure every test counts. ELG is about building a system where each team experiments their own way, but stays aligned on what matters most.
At Kameleoon, we’re proud to power ELG for industry leaders across SaaS, ecommerce, healthcare, finance, and beyond.
Ready to learn more about what separates experimentation leaders from everyone else?
