Traction Lab
Two people walking away down a curved corridor washed in violet and blue light

Traction Lab

Turn product uncertainty into evidence.Turn evidence into traction.

Whether you are creating a new product, trying to restore traction to an existing one, or helping teams repeatedly make better product decisions, the hardest questions often come before you know enough to build or invest confidently.

  • Who really needs this?
  • Which needs matter enough to act on?
  • What are we assuming?
  • What evidence would tell us whether we’re right?
  • And what is the fastest credible way to find out?

Traction Lab helps founders, Product teams and companies answer those questions with evidence from the people and markets that matter.

So they can make better product decisions, faster — and invest behind what has earned the right to move forward.

Three places we work

01 — Startups

Find the traction that earns the right to build

You don’t need dozens of customer interviews or months of discovery.

You need to find the right early adopters, understand what they already do about the problem, identify what they genuinely need and determine the smallest product worth testing with them.

Traction Lab helps startup teams turn uncertainty into evidence — from problem and early-adopter selection through initial product validation and the first credible signs of traction.

Find the people who care enough. Learn what matters. Build only what deserves to be tested.

Explore Startup Traction

02 — SaaS

Find out what changed when traction changes

When SaaS traction weakens or becomes erratic, the product is not necessarily the problem.

The existing market may be changing. The company may be deliberately pursuing a different ideal customer profile — the ICP — without sufficiently adapting the product. Or different parts of the commercial organisation may be attracting customers whose needs no longer fit what the product was designed to deliver.

Traction Lab helps SaaS teams investigate where the disconnect actually lies — using evidence from the users, prospects, churned customers, testers and other populations capable of answering it.

The objective is not more customer research.

It is decision-grade evidence about what is affecting traction and what deserves to change.

Explore SaaS Traction

03 — Corporate new product creation

Earn the right to build

Large companies can be exceptionally good at developing products.

The harder question often comes earlier: do we have enough evidence that we are developing the right one?

Traction Lab brings the ruthless prioritisation, experimental ingenuity and traction-validation disciplines of strong startup accelerators into the uncertain front end of corporate product creation.

Teams identify the few assumptions that matter, determine what evidence would genuinely de-risk them and find the fastest credible way of obtaining it.

Then, as evidence strengthens, the company’s Product, engineering and industrial capabilities can progressively do what they do best.

Build the product properly.

Explore Corporate New Product Creation

The Traction Lab approach

Evidence before certainty.Traction before scale.

Different products require different methods. The discipline underneath them is remarkably consistent.

  1. 01

    Find the consequential uncertainty.

    Not every question deserves answering now. Identify the assumptions capable of materially changing the decision.

  2. 02

    Find the people who can answer it.

    Not simply whoever is easiest to interview. Find users, prospects or customers whose experience and behaviour can genuinely inform the question.

  3. 03

    Decide what evidence would count.

    Interest is not demand. Opinions are not behaviour. A large quantity of customer information is not necessarily decision-grade evidence.

  4. 04

    Find the smallest credible test.

    Don’t build more simply to learn more. Find the least expensive, fastest credible way of resolving the uncertainty that matters now.

  5. 05

    Let the evidence change the decision.

    Continue. Change. Stop. Test again. Or commit more. The greater the next commitment, the stronger the evidence that should earn it.

Experienced enough to lead.

Curious enough to keep learning with the market.

Traction Lab is led by Iain Wallace, a founder, former CEO and product-traction practitioner who has spent much of his career where products meet uncertain markets.

He co-founded a technology company that grew from zero to international product-market traction, raised approximately €20m over seven years and won customers across Europe and the US.

Since then, Iain has worked with 600+ startup founders and technology leaders and with Product and innovation teams inside large companies.

That experience has produced a strong point of view.

But Traction Lab is not built on pretending to know what the market hasn’t told us.

We take a position. We identify what we’re assuming. And we go looking for the evidence capable of proving us wrong.

Because good product decisions don’t come from certainty. They come from knowing what you need to know next — and finding the fastest credible way to know it.

Alongside the practice

With ALMAD Systems

Iain now accompanies ALMAD Systems, a French company that accompanies small and medium-sized businesses as they develop custom software.

ALMAD helps those companies keep a less-is-more approach in the software they run: a system that adapts to their processes, and stays simple. Iain’s role is with the company itself — accompanying ALMAD as it develops into new markets, notably the United Kingdom.

Start with the product question you can’t yet answer

You don’t need to know whether you need a programme, sprint, workshop or something else. Start with the decision.

What important product or traction question can your team not yet answer confidently from inside the building? Let’s see whether the right external evidence can answer it.

Talk to Traction Lab

Address

44, rue Laborde
75008 Paris
France