Wardley Maps are one of the most powerful tools for building situational awareness and shaping strategy in modern organisations. They give you a clear, visual way to understand your landscape — showing how user needs are met through a value chain, and how each component evolves under competitive pressure.
In short, Wardley Mapping helps you see where you are, so you can decide where to go next.
We’ve been using Wardley Maps for over a decade at The Serverless Edge. Following our earlier articles, this post answers one of the most common questions we hear:
“Wardley Mapping sounds great — but how do I actually use it in my organisation?”
🎧 Watch or listen to the full discussion:
1. Don’t Fire Up a Canvas Straight Away
It’s tempting to grab a digital whiteboard and start mapping immediately — especially if you’ve seen Simon Wardley in action. But storming into a Monday morning meeting declaring, “I’ve discovered mapping — let’s do this!” is a risky move.
Mapping can overwhelm people if it’s dropped on them cold. Instead, introduce it gradually and collaboratively. Your goal is not to impress people with your new technique, but to bring them along on a journey of discovery.
Think of Wardley Mapping less as a tool and more as a facilitated conversation about context.
2. Start with the North Star Technique
Before you ever draw a map, begin with a North Star exercise — a lightweight, collaborative way to create shared understanding.
Use a whiteboard, Miro, or sticky notes to explore:
- Purpose: What are we trying to achieve?
- Scope: What’s in and out of bounds?
- Users: Who are our users, and what do they need?
- Metrics: What outcomes or signals matter most?
This 20–60-minute session surfaces assumptions, dependencies, and key priorities. It introduces strategic thinking without overwhelming people with jargon or axes.
Result: You create alignment, curiosity, and the foundation for a future Wardley Map.
3. Take a Design-Centric Approach
Designers rarely explain their process upfront. Instead, they lead with questions, opening up possibilities before narrowing towards clarity. You can apply the same mindset to mapping.
Facilitate, don’t dictate. Ask questions that expand thinking:
- “What’s really driving this user need?”
- “What happens if we move this component closer to utility?”
- “Which dependencies are holding us back?”
By using Wardley Mapping as a discovery tool, you make space for shared insight — and avoid the “consultant with a canvas” trap.
4. Find and Nurture Like-Minded Mappers
You’re probably not alone. Somewhere in your organisation, architects, strategists, and designers are already intrigued by mapping. Find them.
Start small:
- Create a mapping guild or working group.
- Run short sessions in pairs or trios.
- Share pre-reading (e.g., Simon Wardley’s “crossing the river by feeling the stones” talk).
- Capture your outcomes — not just your maps.
Keep your artefacts visible. Leave maps on walls. Post screenshots in Slack. Store maps in Confluence with annotations. Visibility breeds curiosity, and curiosity leads to adoption.
5. Work Backwards from Outcomes
When introducing mapping, it often helps to start with the results rather than the process.
For example:
- “We realised our user onboarding was a bottleneck.”
- “We identified three components that could be commoditised.”
- “We found duplicated effort across teams.”
When people ask how you reached those conclusions, show them the map. The conversation naturally works backwards — from decision → insight → map. This makes mapping feel practical, not abstract.
Think of the map as the “working out” in your strategic maths problem.
6. Use Maps for Rapid Sense-Making
In large organisations, context fades fast. Wardley Maps act as shortcuts to situational awareness.
Revisiting a map six months later instantly rehydrates your memory. Within minutes, you can see:
- What’s evolved or shifted.
- Which components were causing friction.
- Where your next best action lies.
A quick scan before a strategy call can save hours of confusion and misalignment.
7. Annotate and Share Observations
Modern mapping isn’t just about boxes and lines — it’s about insight. Add annotations, patterns, and climatic observations directly to your maps. Write short notes explaining what each movement or decision means.
This documentation lets others absorb weeks of thinking in minutes. It’s also a powerful way to simplify complexity and communicate strategy across teams.
8. Build a Shared Strategic Language
Wardley Mapping introduces a common vocabulary — Genesis, Custom, Product, Commodity — and new archetypes like Explorers, Villagers, and Town Planners.
Once your teams start using this shared language, everything changes:
- “That’s a Genesis idea — we need to explore it.”
- “This component is a commodity — let’s automate it.”
- “We’re in Custom — time to standardise.”
Mapping doesn’t just clarify strategy. It aligns culture, investment, and language.
In one memorable session, we used mapping to help business leaders see why investment needed to move down the stack — not just into shiny front-end features. Once they saw it on the map, the lightbulb went on. From then on, we mapped every major initiative.
9. Mapping as a Shortcut to Clarity
Mapping creates alignment faster than PowerPoint decks or long discussions ever could. It gets everyone — engineers, designers, and business leaders — talking about the same landscape with the same language.
If you’re wrestling with a complex problem, mapping helps you:
- Make sense of uncertainty
- Prioritise decisions logically
- Communicate insights visually
- Re-use strategic knowledge later
It’s not just a tool. It’s a way of seeing.
Next Steps: Bringing Wardley Mapping to Life
- Start small — begin with a North Star session.
- Map collaboratively — not alone.
- Capture and share outcomes openly.
- Keep iterating — maps evolve with your context.
Mapping isn’t a one-off workshop; it’s a continuous sense-making practice.
To dive deeper, explore our book The Value Flywheel Effect — where we discuss how Wardley Mapping integrates with modern cloud strategy, platform thinking, and team topologies.
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