Happy Monday! I'm Cory Foy, and welcome to
another Mapping Monday's video. In this week's video
I want to go back to some basics of Wardley Mapping
and help you create your first map.
Wardley Mapping is, at it's core, a way of
understanding the landscape of components necessary
to deliver one or more user needs.
So we'll start by asking a simple question
Who are your users? And can you identify
one need a user has they come to you for?
So take a piece of paper and write that need
at the top, circling it. Here we'll use an example of
eating a sandwich to make things easier.
With a user need identified, we now need to understand
the components necessary to service that need.
So for each component, write it somewhere below
the user need, circle it, and then connect it to
the user need. For our sandwich, we'll need
bread, cheese, protein, vegetable and condiments.
Each of these are high level components.
Now, what components do we need to service these
high level components? So for bread, we'll need something like flour
for cheese we'll need milk, for protein we could use either
meat, or something like peanut butter. For vegetables we
could have tomato and lettuce, and for condiments we could have things like
mayonnaise and mustard. And we may need to do this loop
a couple of times to get our components. The goal
here isn't necessarily to capture every permutation
or level, but to drive out to interesting insights,
which is where the art of this comes in.
For example, we'll show that for flour, we make it
ourselves, so we need both wheat and a flour mill.
Once we have our components and the
interconnections, we've drawn what's known as a value chain.
This allows us to have a picture of what's necessary
to deliver that user value. It's not a map
yet - but we're close! To make it a map
we have to add one more piece - movement.
Simon Wardley defines four stages of
component evolution in his maps. In Genesis
it's all brand new - from scratch. Custom Built
has enough knowledge to be assembled,
but we have to do it every time. Product means it's
something we can purchase, and utility means we can treat it like
electricity. It's something we can just get without really thinking about it.
So we need to take our components, and
map them to the stages. When we map things
out, we notice that a majority of our components
are products, but bread is something we custom build
using genesis components.
The underlying assumption is that components will evolve through
these stages as they become more widely adopted. So
bread, will eventually mature to be a product we purchase
based on this simple view. In that case
the investments we have in things like the flour mill will become
less valuable, so we can start to think about how we
transition as an organization to hande a new reality
of bread as a product.
The other thing we can look at is other components
that lead to new business opportunities. For example,
someone has to order a sandwich (even in their own head).
And the sandwich has to be assembled. If we do it ourselves
we buy the components, but we still custom
build the sandwich. That could also move
towards productization, creating new market
opportunities for suppliers for ingredients for the sandwich.
And possibly even moving towards Sandwich as a Service
I either order a sandwich and it comes, or
I subscribe to sandwiches and every day a new
one shows up. But now you have your first Wardley Map!
From here you want to map more of your user needs
and ask questions about the landscape that gets generated.
And as you ask more questions, there's a wealth of resources
available to help. Simon has a wonderful blog
and a book in progress, there's a great forum, wiki and
Slack channel, and Ben Mosior has
Learn Wardley Mapping dot com. And, of course, I'm always happy
to jump on a call and help you create your maps or ask questions
about your organization. Just reach out on Twitter at @Cory_foy
or via email at hello at Cory foy dot com.
All of these links are also on the blog post for this video.
Until next week, have fun with your new maps!