Wardley Maps
A Wardley Map plots every component of your value chain by how visible it is to the customer and how evolved it is, from novel and custom-built to boring commodity, so you can see where to build and where to just buy.
Two rows and four columns pin every component by how visible it is and how far it's evolved toward commodity.
Reach for this when…
- You're building something in-house that's actually a solved, boring problem elsewhere.
- Two teams disagree on whether a component is a strategic differentiator or plumbing.
- You're planning multi-year investment and want to see what's about to become commodity.
How to run it
- List every component in your value chain, from the customer need down to the infrastructure underneath it.
- Place each one on the visibility axis: customer-facing at the top, invisible infrastructure at the bottom.
- Score each component's evolution: Genesis (novel, uncertain), Custom-built (bespoke), Product (off-the-shelf), or Commodity/utility (standardised, widely available).
- Plot the map and look for mismatches: things you're custom-building that are already commodity elsewhere.
- Move investment towards the genesis and custom components that differentiate you, and buy or outsource the commodity ones.
A worked example
Situation. Daan de Vries ran a logistics-tracking SaaS company in Rotterdam, Netherlands, whose engineering team had spent a year custom-building their own geolocation engine.
Applied. He mapped the value chain: the geolocation engine sat squarely as commodity infrastructure, already available from several providers, right next to their route-optimisation logic, which was genuinely novel and their real differentiator.
Result. He moved the team off the custom geolocation build onto a commodity provider within a quarter, and redirected the freed engineering time into the route-optimisation logic customers actually paid for.
The catch
Wardley Mapping needs real judgement calls about evolution stage, and two people will place the same component differently. It's a snapshot: components migrate toward commodity over time and the map goes stale. And it says nothing about execution, only about where you're pointed.
If everything on your map sits in 'custom-built', you're not differentiated, you're just not looking hard enough at what's already commodity.
Origin: Simon Wardley