Wardley Mapping

What is the Wardley Mapping template?

The Wardley map serves as a powerful strategic tool to visualize and analyze components of your product, services, or technologies, along with their dependencies. It provides a structured representation of your organization’s landscape to understand its current state better and facilitate smoother decision-making. With Wardley maps, you can create a value chain that illustrates how components evolve from their genesis to eventual commoditization.

By carefully crafting a Wardley map, you gain a holistic view of your business’s structure, unveiling valuable insights into the contextual landscape and ultimately benefiting your users. With the precise positioning of components along the designated axes, you can develop a scalable visualization that effectively communicates your organization’s environment. Additionally, categorizing value chain elements based on their evaluation stage offers a valuable perspective on your competitive position, empowering you to make confident strategic decisions.

What are the benefits of the Wardley Mapping template?

Thanks to the Wardley Mapping template, you can:

• Represent your business’s landscape in a clear and concise way, making it easy to understand and communicate complex ideas and relationships.
• Map out the product’s operating environment to understand upcoming challenges and exploit market gaps.
• Foster collaboration among teams and stakeholders by providing a shared understanding of the system, enabling better adaptation of new processes, and facilitating more effective communication.
• Ensure your teammates are informed and aligned, reducing the risk of costly errors and streamlining processes.
• Make more informed strategic decisions, identify areas for improvement, and prioritize resources effectively.

How to use the Wardley Mapping template in a few steps?

1. Open the Wardley Mapping template on a new whiteboard or add it to an already existing one.
2. Invite your attendees to a video call on the digital board. Send them an online invitation or share the link to the board. 
3. Go through all the panels and write down your answers on sticky notes. Use different colors of sticky notes to differentiate your research. Focus on the:

• Purpose — Articulate your purpose for creating the Wardley map. Ask yourself what prompts you to do this work.
• Scope — Define the scope of the map to stay focused on building a comprehensive map. Ask what it is that you’re mapping, what it includes, and what it doesn’t.
• Users — Add users to your whiteboard after answering who they are, who expects something from you, and who is missing from the picture.
• User Needs — Focus on user needs and define them after discovering who your users are. Become familiar with their requirements to build the right things. Asking yourself if your work is aligned with your user’s needs will be extremely helpful here.
• Value Chain — Specify which real work will meet your user’s needs directly. List all the activities that must happen to bring the requirements to life. Add also any additional action points that need to be addressed to facilitate the activities you’ve just written down. At this point, you should end up with two layers of activities to be performed.
• Map — Categorize the items from your value chain in the last segment according to your determination. Choose where exactly the components belong: Genesis, Custom, Product (+ rental), or Commodity (+ utility).

4. Share the online Wardley Map with other teams to ask for feedback in the form of comments and make updates if necessary.