Iain Acton

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT IAIN ACTON

I work on the decisions teams commit to under uncertainty, before consequences are visible and optimisation adds leverage.My work focuses on the layer most dashboards miss: the intent, judgement, and decision-making that sit upstream of visible behaviour.When growth stalls, teams often respond by moving faster, instrumenting more, and running more experiments. Sometimes that helps. Often it doesn’t. In the worst cases, speed creates an illusion of progress. Activity increases, metrics move locally, but understanding fragments and confidence erodes.The difference is clarity.Teams frequently conflate two very different kinds of clarity.Market clarityWhich segments are actually in scope, which unmet needs and intents matter, and which user decisions are worth optimising at all.Product clarityHow well a solution is serving those needs and intents in practice.Fast feedback accelerates learning only once market clarity is already resolved. Without it, speed tends to amplify disagreement rather than insight.My approach draws on Jobs-to-Be-Done (ODI), behavioural intent analysis, and decision diagnostics to help teams explain stalled progress with confidence rather than guesswork. Diagnosis comes first. Optimisation follows only if it is still warranted.I write and speak about:• intent misdiagnosis and growth stalls• feedback traps and the illusion of progress• decision confidence before experimentation• explaining failure patterns before scaling executionIf you are a product or growth leader facing a stall that does not quite make sense yet, that is often the moment to slow down, diagnose, and get clear.