How Minecraft uses experimentation to de-risk big bets and fuel wild-scale growth

How Minecraft Drives Measurable Growth Through Experimentation

Host: Matt Wright

Guest: Tim Mehta, Lead Experimentation PM at Minecraft

Duration: 45 minutes

Minecraft isn’t just one of the best-selling games of all time; it’s a live, global ecosystem where every tweak is scrutinised by millions. In this episode, Tim Mehta takes us inside the machine room where Minecraft turns uncertainty into high-confidence decisions.

Tim shares how the team broke free from a “ship it and hope” mindset and rebuilt their culture around measurable growth, killing weak ideas early, doubling down on proven ones, and saving the org from multimillion-dollar detours. He also unpacks what it’s actually like to experiment in front of one of the most vocal communities in gaming… without lighting the internet on fire.

What you’ll learn

Testing at massive scale without breaking everything

How Minecraft ships experiments into one of the highest-traffic environments on Earth without blowing up player trust or the product.

The ladder of evidence: goodbye gut feel

Why teams that rely on intuition lose, and how upgrading your evidence stack instantly raises your odds of shipping something that actually moves numbers.

The three rules of a platform that doesn’t slow you down

Trustworthiness. Velocity. Democratization. Miss any one of these and your experimentation program becomes theatre.

Growth x Experimentation: The power combo

How experimentation ties directly into activation, retention, monetisation, and long-term player obsession.

Optimizing web vs. optimizing gameplay

Why tweaking a marketing funnel and tweaking core gameplay require totally different muscles, and what most teams get wrong when crossing that line.