Strategy & competition
Wardley Mapping
A visual method that maps the components serving a user need against how evolved each one is, from genesis to commodity, so that strategy can be debated as position and movement on a shared map rather than as competing opinions.
Also known as Wardley Maps, Value chain evolution mapping. First set out by Simon Wardley in 2005; the primary source is cited in full below.
- Format
- Mapping
- Level
- Corporate · Business unit · Product
- Best for
- Analyse the environment · Position against competitors · Evaluate options
- Decision stage
- Diagnose · Explore options · Decide
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to apply
- A day to produce a first useful map with the right people in the room; fluency takes sustained practice.
Plate · The model
The components
Anchor on user needs
The map begins with users and the needs they are trying to satisfy. Every component on the map exists only because it ultimately serves one of these needs, which keeps the analysis honest about what matters.
Signals of strength
Users are named, with distinct needs listed for each · Needs are expressed as outcomes rather than features · Internal wants are not masquerading as user needs
Map the value chain
Components are arranged vertically by visibility to the user, each linked to what depends on it and what it depends on. The chain makes explicit the structure that organisation charts and capability lists hide.
Signals of strength
Every component exists because something above it needs it · User-facing components sit at the top, invisible plumbing at the bottom · Dependencies are drawn explicitly and have been contested
Plot evolution
Each component is positioned by how evolved it is: genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. Evolution is driven by supply and demand competition, and position implies method: experimentation suits genesis, six-sigma efficiency suits commodity.
Signals of strength
Placement is argued from ubiquity and certainty rather than age · Components under competitive pressure are marked as moving right · Nobody is custom-building something the map shows as a commodity
Challenge and decide plays
The map becomes strategy when it is contested and then acted on: applying doctrine, anticipating movement, and choosing gameplay suited to each component's position. A map that decides nothing is decoration.
Signals of strength
The map has been attacked by people who know the landscape · Methods match evolution stage rather than one process fitting all · Chosen plays reference position and movement on the map
When it earns its keep
- You need a shared, challengeable picture of your landscape before committing to build, buy or outsource decisions.
- Components in your value chain are commoditising and you need to anticipate what that movement does to your position and your competitors' positions.
- Strategy discussions keep dissolving into opinion and anecdote, and you want an artefact people can point at, contest and improve.
- You are deciding where to spend scarce engineering effort and want to stop custom-building what the market already supplies as a product or utility.
And when it doesn't
- You need an answer this afternoon. A first useful map takes real effort with the right people in the room, and the method has a steep learning curve.
- The question is primarily about people, culture or team performance. Mapping analyses landscape; pair it with organisational tools for internal questions.
- You want a defensible quantified forecast. Evolution positions are structured judgements, and presenting a map as measurement overstates what it is.
- Nobody who knows the landscape first-hand is available. A map drawn from assumption alone simply diagrams the ignorance of its makers.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- A defined scope: which users, which needs, which line of business the map serves.
- People with first-hand knowledge of the value chain, from customer-facing staff to engineers.
- An honest inventory of the components involved in meeting the need, including activities, practices, data and knowledge.
- Market awareness of what competitors and suppliers already offer as products or utilities.
- 1
Anchor on users and their needs
Name the users and list what they actually need as outcomes. The map hangs from this anchor; a map that starts from the organisation's products rather than user needs has skipped the step that gives everything else meaning.
- 2
Draw the value chain
Work down from each need through the components required to meet it, each depending on those below. Position on the vertical axis reflects visibility to the user: the interface at the top, the invisible plumbing at the bottom.
- 3
Plot each component on the evolution axis
Place every component along the horizontal axis through genesis, custom-built, product (including rental) and commodity (including utility). Argue placement from characteristics such as ubiquity, certainty and market maturity rather than from age. This two-axis picture, value chain against evolution, is the canonical form of the map.
- 4
Add movement and inertia
Everything on the map drifts rightward under supply and demand competition. Mark which components are moving, which face inertia (past success, sunk capital, vested interests), and where a shift would restructure the chain above it.
- 5
Challenge the map
All maps are imperfect; their value is in being contested. Put the map in front of people who know the landscape and let them attack placements and dependencies. The disagreements are usually the most informative part of the exercise.
- 6
Decide the plays
Apply doctrine (use appropriate methods per stage, remove duplication, buy what is commodity) and then choose context-specific gameplay: where to build, where to consume utilities, where an open approach or a land-grab makes sense. The map is finished when it changes a decision.
Reading the result
A shared map of the landscape: user needs at the anchor, the value chain beneath them, every component positioned by evolution, with movement and inertia marked, plus the strategic plays the map justifies.
- Read right to left for pressure: components drifting toward commodity stop being sources of differentiation and start being costs to minimise or utilities to consume.
- Look for mismatches between position and treatment: custom-building a commodity wastes money, and industrialising something still in genesis kills it.
- Watch the interfaces. When a lower component commoditises, it enables new value at the layers above it; the opportunity usually appears one level up from the movement.
A worked example
A regional broadband ISP maps its landscape before the next network investment
An independent fibre ISP serving three English counties has grown by building its own network where the incumbents were slow. National wholesale fibre is now arriving in its towns, and the board must decide whether the next tranche of capital goes into more network build or something else. They map the landscape before deciding.
- Anchor on user needs
- Users are households and small businesses. Pressed to state needs as outcomes, the team lists reliable connectivity, painless setup, and support that answers the phone. Speed, the thing the marketing leads with, turns out to be table stakes; the felt needs are reliability and being treated well when something breaks.
- Map the value chain
- From the needs downward: local support and installation at the top, then the brand and billing relationship, the router in the home, then the invisible layers: backhaul, core network, and the physical fibre. Drawing it exposes that the firm's identity ('we build fibre') sits at the bottom of the chain, furthest from what users perceive.
- Plot evolution
- Connectivity itself is a commodity. The fibre and backhaul layers are products moving briskly toward utility as national wholesale access expands into the region. Routers are commodity despite the in-house custom firmware project. The genuinely custom-built component is the local service experience: same-day engineer visits, named support staff. A community-partnership build model the team is piloting sits near genesis.
- Challenge and decide plays
- Engineers challenge the map and concede the firmware project differentiates nothing; it dies in the meeting. The plays that survive: consume wholesale backhaul where it arrives rather than overbuilding against it, stop capital spend on network layers the market will supply as utility, and pour investment into the custom-built service layer, which national competitors serving millions cannot copy at regional quality.
The read. The map reverses the instinctive plan. The board had intended to defend by building more network; the map shows the network layers commoditising underneath them while the defensible ground is the service layer above. Capital shifts to service and the genesis-stage partnership model, with a staged exit planned for owned assets the wholesale market will shortly make redundant. The decision came from position and movement, and the room could see why.
Pitfalls
- Anchoring on the business rather than the user. A map that starts from 'our products' produces a flattering org chart with an x-axis.
- Treating evolution placement as fact. It is structured judgement; the discipline is arguing placement from characteristics, and the disagreements are data.
- Confusing the evolution axis with a maturity or diffusion curve. Evolution is driven by competition and read from ubiquity and certainty, which is why the axis has no time scale.
- Making one beautiful map and framing it. Maps earn their keep by being challenged, redrawn and used to argue real decisions.
- Mapping the whole enterprise at once. Scope to one user need; sprawling maps convince no one and decide nothing.
What the critics say
A map can only represent what its makers already know, and it cannot say which new components will emerge at genesis. Practitioner critiques warn that a confident-looking map can lend false authority to a group's shared blind spots.
Buerkli, D. 'Where the map ends: understanding Wardley maps' limitations', Medium.
The evolution axis has been challenged as measuring social consensus rather than any objective evolutionary state: what a group agrees is 'commodity' reflects their frame of reference, which makes maps artefacts of agreement as much as of analysis.
Edgar, M. (2017) 'What do Wardley maps really map? A settler writes', blog.mattedgar.com.
The method has little peer-reviewed empirical validation. The claimed evolutionary patterns rest largely on Wardley's own practitioner research, and reported benefits come from case accounts rather than controlled study, so adopters are trusting craft knowledge rather than tested theory.