Designing and Growing Incumbent-Born Platforms with Agility

Legacy firms increasingly launch their own digital platforms, yet they frequently fail not for lack of resources, but because they attempt to manage a fundamentally new organizational logic with the tools and mindsets of the old one. While existing research has identified the barriers legacy firms face when building platforms, the process through which they navigate this transition remains poorly understood. This study investigates how a legacy firm designs and grows a platform through the lens of agility. Drawing on a single revelatory case of Alfa, a 300,000-person industrial conglomerate that created a multi-sided digital platform, and combining in-depth interviews with extensive archival data, we apply the Gioia methodology to reconstruct the full arc of the platform initiative across time. Our analysis identifies distinct phases through which agility does not appear as a stable organizational capability, but as a shape-shifting response whose form and function change as the nature of the platform uncertainty changes. We make three contributions. First, we introduce the concept of platform-led agility and offer a process model that explains how agile behaviors enable platform teams to resolve structural and cognitive misfits encountered at each phase of platform creation. Second, we extend the agility literature by showing that, in this context, agility is neither a methodological tool nor a cultural choice, but an emergent need that the platform initiative itself demands. Third, we contribute to the incumbent-born platform literature by focusing on the creation process, demonstrating that the barriers incumbents face are not simultaneous but sequential, and that each phase requires a qualitatively different organizational response.