Wardley Map

Wardley Mapping Canvas Template

Build an intuitive understanding of your business context.

About the Wardley Map template

What is a Wardley Map?

A Wardley Map was developed to map the structure of a business, understand its context, and better serve users. You place components with value on the y-axis and commodity on the x-axis.

Every organization operates within a landscape that contextualizes and influences your decisions. To build a Wardley Map, you must illustrate that landscape as a value chain. What’s a value chain? It’s a series of activities or elements that are required to meet a user’s needs. You categorize each element of the value chain according to their stage of evolution compared to the competition. The resulting Wardley Map describes your assumptions and intentions for anyone to read.

The goal of Wardley mapping is to build a shareable, scalable visualization of the landscape surrounding your business. It allows you to articulate your strategy while summarizing the landscape in a way that’s easy to understand. A Wardley Map is like a time capsule, capturing your understanding at a certain point in time and documenting it for the future.

Why use a Wardley Map?

Use a Wardley map to assess future scenarios, quickly validate solutions, and develop a shared visual understanding of a business' context. Using a Wardley Map, you can significantly reduce a project's risk and avoid costly mistakes.

The benefits of using a Wardley Map

Benefit 1 - Enhance communication. Easily communicate your understanding of the landscape to your team, new hires, and stakeholders. Wardley Maps are powerful tools that can help get new employees up to speed quickly, so they can hit the ground running on day one.

Benefit 2 - Identify risks and opportunities. A Wardley Map clearly lays out the environment in which your product is operating, as well as the value chain that constrains it. This allows you to understand the challenges ahead and how can exploit market gaps.

Benefit 3 - Reduce costs. Wardley Maps help ensure everyone on your team is aligned, and that cross-functional partners share your understanding of the landscape. This alignment reduces costly errors and streamlines your processes.

Benefit 4 - Foster collaboration. Wardley mapping empowers you to minimize risk and conflict across your teams. Teams that engage in Wardley mapping report higher satisfaction, deeper understanding, and closer alignment on shared goals.

Wardley Mapping Canvas Template

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