Wardley maps

TL;DR

Ask your agent

Use Plotwork to draw a Wardley map of our checkout. The customer is the anchor. Place the checkout page, payments, fraud checks, the order service, and the cloud it runs on by how visible and how evolved each is, and mark what we build and what we buy.

Use Plotwork to draw a Wardley map of our platform team. Show the deploy pipeline as built in house with inertia, and plan its move to a bought product. Add a note about why.

Example

The tea shop Simon Wardley uses to teach the method: the business and the public need a cup of tea, which needs tea, a cup, hot water, and staff. The kettle has inertia, and the plan is to move it to an electric kettle bought as a product.

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Build or buy for a platform team

A platform team's map, with every source mark. The deploy pipeline is built in house and resists change, so the plan moves it to a bought product. Kubernetes has a pipeline: it runs in several forms at once, from a hand-run cluster to a managed one.

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An observability stack

How on-call engineers see their systems, with short stage names, icons on the parts they look at, and two planned moves. The SLO reports are in violet, because the team builds them and wants them noticed.

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The language

The header

wardley "Title" stages="Genesis, Custom built, Product, Commodity" desc="<text>"

The title and both options are optional. stages= renames the four stages of evolution, from genesis to commodity, in one quoted value with commas between the names. With no stages= the map uses Simon Wardley's own names: Genesis, Custom built, Product (+rental), and Commodity (+utility). desc= is the plain-language description that screen readers announce.

Statements

Anchors and components

Every part has an id, which links use, and a label in quotes, which the picture shows. Leave the label out and the id is the label. Both values run from 0 to 1:

A value outside 0 to 1 is an error, and the hint says what it most likely meant: visibility=80 is read as a percentage, so the hint says to write visibility=0.8. Anchors usually sit near the top, at a visibility of 0.9 or more.

A component can say how it is sourced, which the map draws with the standard marks, and whether it resists change:

A legend under the map explains the marks the map uses, and only those.

Evolution stages

The plate is divided into four stages by dashed lines at 0.17, 0.4, and 0.7 along the evolution axis, the boundaries OnlineWardleyMaps and Mermaid draw. A part on a boundary belongs to the later stage, so a part at 0.4 is a product. The outline says which stage each part is in.

Dependencies and flows

A link goes from the part that needs to the part it needs, which usually sits lower on the map.

Add a label after a colon: cup -> kettle : "boils". It is drawn in a pill on the line, clear of the parts.

Planned moves, pipelines and notes

evolve kettle 0.62 "Electric kettle" plans a move: a red dashed arrow from the kettle to a ghost of it at evolution 0.62, labelled with the new name. Leave the name out to keep the part's own. A part moves once.

pipeline kettle from=0.35 to=0.62 draws a band under the kettle across that range, for a part that exists in several forms at once, such as hand-built and bought kettles.

note "Standard power lets kettles evolve faster" visibility=0.3 evolution=0.72 writes a remark with its top left at that place, moved inside the plate when it would cross an edge.

Limits and warnings

Lint also warns when:

From Mermaid

convert_mermaid reads Mermaid's wardley-beta maps, and wardley for when the type leaves beta. Mermaid's text is close to the OnlineWardleyMaps format, so a map written in OnlineWardleyMaps converts when you put a wardley-beta line above it. Both write a place as [visibility, evolution]; Plotwork names each value, so they cannot be swapped.

After converting, check the value chain in the outline from each anchor down, mark what you build, buy, or outsource with source=, and add a title.

See also