Projects

Disney World guests rate almost everything positively. Except getting in.

I spent a few weeks turning 604 Walt Disney World trip reports into a guest journey map. Eleven stages, from booking a hotel to flying home, each one rated bad, neutral or good by the person who lived it. Almost every stage came back positive. Rides scored +65, resort stays +62, dining +51. Cast members, fireworks, characters, all comfortably in the black. One stage went negative: park entry and crowds, at -6. It's the only part of a Disney trip that guests, on balance, do no

21 hours ago5 min read

Disney World's crowds are down. The number everyone quotes to prove it doesn't work.

Last year a run of articles reported that Walt Disney World had gotten noticeably emptier. Most of them leaned on the same kind of evidence: third-party wait time trackers showing crowd levels at multi-year lows. Disney, meanwhile, was describing attendance as broadly stable. Both things looked true at once, which is what made it interesting. A posted wait time measures how long a queue is, not how many people walked through the gate. There are several reasons those two numb

Sep 156 min read

Culinary Variety Collapses at the Top of the Michelin Guide

What 19,460 restaurants show about specialization, and why the first version of this chart was wrong.

Sep 34 min read

Persona Validator Tool - Most personas are invented. I built one that proves itself.

Live tool: https://personavalidator.app Walk-through trailer: The problem I kept running into Personas are supposed to anchor product decisions. In practice, most are invented. Someone writes up a plausible-sounding user, gives them a name and a stock photo, and the team treats that fiction as evidence for months. When a stakeholder asks "how do we know this persona is real," the honest answer is usually that we do not. That gap bothered me enough to build a tool that closes

Jul 14 min read