Graham McNicoll

My head of Experimentation named our product development framework after Jon Hamm. I chose not to ask questions. What it actually does is stop teams from building things nobody wants. Most product teams I see spec out the entire feature before validating a single assumption. Months of designs and complete user flows, all before one real user has indicated they care. HAMM flips that sequence. Before you write a line of code, you answer four questions: - Hypothesis. Why do you think this will work? - Actions. What would a user do to indicate that hypothesis is true or false? - Metrics. What numbers would show those actions happened? - MVP. What is the smallest thing you can build to validate it? That last one is where most teams go wrong. They skip straight to the full build. A painted door test takes an afternoon. Put a button on a page and see if people click on it. You can build in minutes what might take months and still fail. You can save hundreds of development hours and future maintenance costs with this approach. I have shipped features that took months and moved nothing. I have run painted door tests in a day that reshaped the entire roadmap. The difference between those two outcomes is whether someone asked the HAMM questions before the team started building. Jon Hamm has never formally endorsed this framework. I believe he would. If you want to see how we run HAMM across a product team, send me a DM.