Disneyland is an informed bet, not an MVP.
What does Walt Disney have to tell us about MVPs.
2025-01-26
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I despise MVP culture. It’s the weakest form of making something. Instead of taking a point of view everyone just makes excuses about things. Certainly that’s how it feels. Entire cottage industries seem to have appeared from this. Frameworks like Build-Measure-Learn or Assumption Mapping. TBH, I’m not even too enthusiastic about Continuous Discovery.
I’m in Florida and went to Disney. It’s impressive. The scale is massive. They’re expert at separating you from your money. There are some mysteries, like why do they have lines at all? Why isn’t there more curation. Why are some properties so underinvested? But, I’m not the target customer for Disney and likely will never return. So it’s hard to think through what they’re trying to achieve.
They definetly created an experience and are leaning into it. They’re not bashful. They make big bets. I suspect some of those bets don’t pay off. And I’d guess that some of those bets end up way too small (like Marvel should be way bigger right?).
As of today, I think that staking a position and a perspective is the correct way to build a product. I think the MVP era is over. It’s straightforward to build large products. It’s straightforward to make most features. You should still learn, be willing to reformulate your hypothesis and start again. But this idea that you need to test early or that software is incredibly expensive and hard to build is a foolish notion.
You’re at fault if the software you’re building is complex and hard to build and rebuild. Instead of focusing on MVPs and Discorvery Habits and all this stuff. We should be focusing on externalizing business rules and ensuring that software is more pluggable. That we can rip parts out and replace them. That it’s easy to turn things on and off.
Business rules are complex and irrational. Software is where this shows up. Inside the industry we have all these pushes towards observability or pure functions. My favorite is state machines, but they’re as stupid as the rest. All these little tools are us trying to protect certain areas of the app from the schysophrenic world of business rules.
Disney meanwhile builds a god damn theme park in Orlando and markets the hell of it. The experience is a vision and an opinion. This is how the world “should be” from his perspective.
I’m quite sure there’s learning and itterating. I’d bet more than there is at software companies. My experience in software is that almost nobody is iterating. Probably hiring a manager at Disney would have more impact on interating than any MBA Bro PM.