Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping. @ Irrational Exuberance

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This is the weekly digest for my blog, Irrational Exuberance. Reach out with thoughts on Twitter at @lethain, or reply to this email.

Posts from this week:

- Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping.

Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping.

In my ongoing efforts to draft a book on engineering strategy, I’ve finally reached the point where I need to transition “Wardley Mapping” from a topic to consider including into a topic that I either do or do not include. The first step on that line is getting much deeper at understanding how it works. This is rather different than systems modeling, which is a technique I’ve been using off-and-on at work for 15-plus years, but I will make a solid go at it.

My starting point is having read The Value Flywheel Effect by David Anderson, and attempted a few times unsuccessfully to read Wardley Maps by Simon Wardley on Medium. Let’s see how it goes.

1. Markus pointed me towards his excellent list of Wardley mapping resources

2. What Is Wardley Mapping? by Mike Lamb is a quick, very high-level introduction to the concepts.

3. The Easiest Way to Do Wardley Mapping (A Tutorial) is a good first starting point.

   Within this example, there are two templates to work from: lists & value chain template and Wardley map template. You can then use the template in whatever diagramming tool you prefer, the video uses Miro, and I used OmniGraffle.

   It also links to this table for determining stage of a given activity within a Wardley Map, and this table describing opportunities. Both of these are useful in various steps of creating/refining a Wardley Map.

4. How to read a Wardley Map. Bit of a repeat of above.

5. The Problem with Wardley Mapping. Talks about the various ways that people often get stuck using Wardley Maps: taking “all or nothing” approaches to both method and scope. Rooted in this article, Nobody Cares About Your Precious Framework.

   First, it describes the number of “Wardley mapping practices” and how it’s valuable to simplify initially. Specifically, start by just building lists of users and needs, as opposed to trying everything all at once. Second, it describes how users can have many needs, there might be three or four users each with ten needs, which gets overwhelming. To solve that, focus on doing one user and one need, and then expand from there to prove out the value.

6. Top 5 Wardley Mapping Tools in 2024 on YouTube, and also available in blog post. Of these, particularly interested in damonsk/onlinewardleymaps which seems like a Graphviz approach, and reminds me a bit of my experiment with lethain/systems that I build for systems modeling.

   That said, I’ll probably give Mapkeep a try first. My issue with systems modeling tooling is primarily that it’s very confusing to use, and Mapkeep seems like it might have the lowest overhead to usage of these Wardley mapping tools.

7. Situation Normal, Everything Must Change by Simon Wardley on YouTube. This is a good overview of Wardley mapping, although a bit surface level. A good first watch.

8. Wardley Mapping Part 1-4 by Simon Wardley on YouTube. A more detailed introduction to the same content as the Situation Normal, Everything Must Change talk above. The first two are a bit redundant with some of the prior talks, but the third and fourth are additive and quite useful.

9. Mapping Your Stack by Adrian Cockroft. Much of this is repeat of the above, but around 22:20 it goes into mapping a concrete example that I found quite interesting.

10. Wardley Maps for Software Developers by Markus Harrer. Most helpfully, it gets into concrete maps quickly, and walks through a number of distinct examples.

11. At this point, I signed up for a free Mapkeep, and started mapping.

12. My first project was this post on the evolution of the developer meta-productivity space, which gave me the opportunity to play around with a simple map and the evolution of that map over the past four years.

    At this time, that’s still just a draft post, but was still a good opportunity for mapping practice. I also think it would have been much harder to form and articulate my point of view without the map, which is a good signal.

13. Next, I did some exploratory mapping of Gitlab’s strategy (e.g. why focus on bundling all-in versus Github’s strategy of supporting best-in-breed unbundling). This was quick, and instructive. It’s also giving me a better sense of what sort of problems Wardley mapping is useful for exploring (and which it isn’t so useful at digging into).

At this point, I feel pretty comfortable jumping into Mapkeeper and mapping something out. That’s not to say that I can’t improve, I certainly can improve a lot, but my sense is that this is going to primarily depend on doing more mapping, and less on some sort of magical realization.

There’s also a lot of stuff bundled into Wardley mapping that I think is quite useful, but isn’t as important to me as the components I’ve focused on here. For example, Wardley’s idea of doctrine and gameplay are great, but I generally would approach these sorts of things as “one particular kind of strategy” rather than a different category. That’s not a refutation of Wardley’s framing, just a different one that I’ve found more useful for the sorts of problems I’m currently focused on.

That's all for now! Hope to hear your thoughts on Twitter at @lethain!

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