Wardley Maps: Do What Only You Can Do, Outsource the Rest
Table of Contents
Wardley Maps: Do What Only You Can Do, Outsource the Rest #
We have discussed that to thrive in modern business, one must possess a “distinctive edge” (alpha advantage). We also deeply understand that “strategic positioning” and “operational efficiency” are two fundamentally different things: strategy means not only clearly defining what you do, but also clearly delineating what you absolutely do not do.
You should dedicate your core energy to things that highlight your uniqueness, and hand over all standardized, outsourceable tasks to others. Never let your company’s most valuable talent do the most mundane work.
The reasoning is clear, but you might be surprised to learn how many businesses in the real world simply cannot distinguish what to outsource from what to do in-house.
For instance, an educational institution spends a month developing its own login system; a manufacturing company invests heavily to build its own cloud platform, claiming to “control core technology,” yet disregarding ready-made services that are a hundred times cheaper and ten thousand times better. Or, an individual wanting to create self-media spends three hours every day tinkering with note templates… These are all examples of pseudo-diligence lacking strategic thinking.
Good steel should be used on the blade’s edge. But do you truly know where that edge is?
The mental tool introduced in this article, called “Wardley Mapping,” distills business and personal strategy into one sentence:
What is uniquely valuable, do yourself; what can be ordinary, outsource to the world.
Origins and Core Principles of Wardley Mapping #
Wardley Maps did not originate in academia but were born on the business front lines. Around 2005, Simon Wardley, a British CEO of Fotango, invented this tool [1] due to his frustration with the clichés and blind imitation of competitors prevalent in executive reports.
Wardley’s insight was: entrepreneurs’ lack of strategic awareness stems from their absence of a “map.” Military commanders have maps, allowing them to survey the entire battlefield and understand all terrain features; similarly, as a business executive, you must clearly understand the position of each of your company’s business units and the overarching trends of the overall environment.
A core assumption of Wardley Mapping is “Everything Evolves.” According to innovation diffusion theory and market competition laws, any technology, best practice, or business model, no matter how powerful or proprietary at its inception, will eventually and irreversibly move towards commoditization, becoming something easily accessible to the masses. Therefore, to earn supernormal profits, we must focus our energy on things that are in their genesis stage and are currently still unique.
This map aims to simultaneously represent the objectives of serving customers and the evolution trend of the business. It is a Cartesian coordinate system where you need to decompose the various functional modules of a product or business and plot them onto the map—
The y-axis represents “Value Chain Visibility.” At the very top of the map are the end-users and their core needs, which serve as the anchor for the entire map. The higher up, the more direct the user perception; the lower down, the more it signifies underlying supportive infrastructure hidden behind the scenes.
The x-axis represents “Evolution,” divided from left to right into four irreversible stages:
- Genesis: Refers to something very novel, potentially misunderstood, with immense risk, possibly representing the future, but also potentially an illusion in scientific research.
- Custom-built: The item is handcrafted for specific needs and already possesses some value.
- Product/Rental: The item’s functions are clearly defined, and it can be directly purchased or rented on the market, akin to ready-to-wear clothing.
- Commodity/Utility: The item is fully standardized and extremely inexpensive, like water, electricity, or internet, equivalent to fabric sold by weight.
In short, the y-axis does not measure the importance of a functional module but rather its proximity to the user and whether the user can directly perceive its existence; the x-axis measures its maturity in the market.
Wardley reminds us that everything on the map automatically evolves to the right: today’s proprietary unique skill is tomorrow’s common tool, today’s economic rent is tomorrow’s water, electricity, and gas utility.
Case Study: Strategic Layout of a University Coffee Shop #
Imagine you’re opening a coffee shop on a university campus. Without drawing a map, you might think, “We need to go digital,” and impulsively want to develop your own ordering mini-program—but is this truly your competitive advantage for making money? Let’s see how to draw a Wardley Map.
First, define your users: students. What students want is not “to experience your independently developed ordering system,” but good-tasting, fast, affordable coffee, with seating, a social atmosphere, and ideally, something to “fuel them through exam week.”
Decompose the value chain downwards along the y-axis: Students need study space, quick service, quality beverages, and friendly prices → these in turn depend on menu design, staff procedures, seating arrangements, club collaborations, late-night service during exam week, supply chain, coffee machines, payment systems, membership systems, utilities (water, electricity), internet, and so on. These modules also have interdependencies, which we won’t detail here.
Now, let’s look at them on the x-axis. Payment, ordering, membership systems, utilities, and internet are all inexpensive, readily available infrastructure components; they belong far to the right and should be purchased directly without much thought. Coffee machines and regular supply chains are likely productized, requiring careful selection. However, late-night exam week specials, co-branded club cup sleeves, quiet seating zones, campus culture memes, and whether the owner remembers students’ names are closer to the user and offer more room for customization; they are located in the mid-left area of the map, which is your strategic focus zone.
The map would look something like this—
Simply the process of drawing this map can help you clarify many thoughts.
Perhaps you majored in computer science in college, and thus, upon opening a coffee shop, you might be tempted to develop your own membership system, feeling you can finally show off your skills… Unbeknownst to you, from the perspective of this business, your programming skills are essentially worthless. No matter what your strengths are, you can certainly use “effectual reasoning” to find a business that suits you—but if you’re opening a campus coffee shop, you must follow the logic of a campus coffee shop.
The logic of a campus coffee shop is that students won’t pay because your database architecture is “sexy.” But they will remember that you opened at 2 AM during finals.
In large companies, many departments fiercely defend their so-called “core competencies,” which, on the map, have long since devolved into generic commodities on the far right. Your company’s R&D department might strongly insist on using their internally developed “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system,” proclaiming it’s critically important to the business and a competitive moat! Yet, there are clearly ten vendors in the market offering better and cheaper alternatives.
Wardley Maps force you to admit: many so-called “our business segment is special” is merely “our inefficiency has a long history.”
Two Major Strategic Actions with Wardley Maps #
Facing a completed map, you can take two main strategic actions.
The first is to bet.
Clearly, you should heavily invest in the modules in the “mid-left area” of the map; these are in the genesis and custom-built stages and are closer to the users at the top. This area contains significant ambiguity, lacks industry consensus, and is the source of your competitive advantage.
The bottom right, however, is where things should be resolutely outsourced, purchased, or replaced with AI. This often represents the lowest-level infrastructure, with standard tools and ready-made services.
Cloud services should be stable; no need to be “touching.” Payment gateways should be reliable, not “romantic.” Reimbursement systems should be affordable, not “dramatic.” Compliance should be clear, not “an epic.” What truly deserves your personal refinement are the elements on the left: deep user understanding, industry tacit knowledge, critical data, evaluation systems, business interpretation capabilities, and brand trust, etc.
If your company’s so-called “use of AI” is merely about cost reduction and efficiency improvement in the bottom-right quadrant, I do not consider AI your strategic tool.
The second is to formulate a productization and migration roadmap.
Everything on the map moves to the right: genesis becomes custom-built, custom-built becomes a general product, and a product becomes a cheap commodity. Therefore, we must have the awareness to transform today’s core competitive advantages into tomorrow’s infrastructure. Initially, you might manually customize solutions for each client on the left, but with accumulated experience, you can push them to the right, solidifying them into standard templates, feature libraries, and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures).
Strategic masters extract reproducible products from one-off projects.
Practical Cases: Government Services and Industrial Predictive Maintenance #
Let’s look at two more examples.
The first is a real-world case; I want to show you how sharp a tool Wardley Maps can be.
In 2011, several large IT projects by the UK government suffered disastrous failures, not only failing to meet the demands of modern digital services but also severely overrunning their budgets. Against this backdrop, the newly established Government Digital Service (GDS) was tasked with overhauling these projects. Their devised solution was to mandate that all departments draw Wardley Maps: Who is the ultimate user of your project? What are their core needs? [2]
It turned out that 80% of departments were unable to accurately define the end-users of their services… By the time GDS finally compiled information from various projects and drew the overall map, they discovered that components like server racks and payment gateways, which should have been highly standardized “commodities,” were being treated as unique “custom-built” operations by various departments—duplicated a staggering 118 times!
GDS acted decisively, halting all internal customization of underlying infrastructure and shifting entirely to large-scale market procurement, thereby saving the British public treasury billions of pounds in waste.
The second is a fictional case; I want to show you what a slightly more complex Wardley Map looks like.
Imagine you’ve started a company specializing in providing “predictive maintenance” services to small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises. Simply put, you meticulously monitor machine operating status, use AI to predict when a machine will fail before it breaks down, and promptly offer maintenance recommendations. Let’s break down how this value chain should be mapped.
Layer 1: Your users are factory owners and production managers. What they want isn’t “to use AI,” but “to prevent machines from suddenly breaking down”; in more professional terms, to reduce unplanned downtime, ensure on-time delivery, and lower maintenance waste.
To achieve this, you need to provide them with a downtime risk alert dashboard service.
Layer 2: The above service relies on three modules: fault explanation, risk scoring, and work order process integration;
Layer 3: The risk scoring module, in turn, depends on three modules: fault knowledge graph, equipment status data pipeline, and historical maintenance records, …;
Layer 4 consists of sensors, gateways, time-series databases, cloud computing, network/power, and so on.
By plotting each module on the relevant coordinates of the Wardley Map and connecting the dependencies between layers with lines, we get the diagram below—
With the map, the thought process becomes very clear. Cloud computing, time-series databases, sensors, and general large model APIs on the right should all be purchased externally. What is truly worth doing yourself is in the mid-left area: fault explanation and maintenance recommendations, fault knowledge graph, risk scoring, etc.
You can also see from the diagram that the “equipment status data pipeline” module, although currently in the custom-built zone, is very close to the product zone—indicating that you can package it into a generic product in the future.
You claim to be an AI company, but the core of this business is not AI itself, but “AI + equipment knowledge + production responsibility.”
As the saying goes, models can be outsourced, but responsibility cannot; computing power can be rented, but industry judgment cannot.
Everyone can use AI, but you must use it this way to make money with AI.
Applying Wardley Maps to Personal Development #
Personal development can also utilize Wardley Maps, with its core ethos being “user awareness + left-right awareness.”
For example, if you say, “I want to become an AI expert within three years.” From the perspective of Wardley Mapping, that statement is meaningless: What constitutes an AI expert? You don’t even know who your user is.
A true expert must be someone who can deliver results in a specific context. If you’re job-seeking, your user is a prospective employer; if you’re starting a business, your user is a client; if you’re doing research, your user is the academic community; if you’re creating content, your user is the reader. Different users mean entirely different maps.
Identify the user and their needs, decompose layer by layer, then examine the x-axis of the map. Common skills, such as Python language, prompt templates, and RAG tools, are already productized or even commoditized, located on the right. Of course, you need to know how to use them, but these are not your core betting points.
You must look to the left, focusing on things that are harder to standardize: deep business understanding of specific vertical industries, the narrative ability to transform complex data into business decisions, evaluation insights from real projects, etc.
You don’t want to become “someone who can use a hundred AI tools”; you want to become “someone who can define problems, organize data, evaluate results, and implement closed-loop improvements in a real-world scenario.”
Why It’s Easier Said Than Done: Common Pitfalls in Practice #
The principles of Wardley Maps seem simple, yet in reality, people are very fond of building things in-house that should be outsourced. Some enterprises insist on controlling their infrastructure, using an extremely bloated operations team to create a cumbersome, expensive, and user-unfriendly system. This is akin to a restaurant building its own power station or a writer spending half a year tinkering with a personal website. What exactly are they aiming for?
Firstly, it’s mistaking a sense of control for competitiveness. “We have our own system” sounds secure, but it doesn’t generate any profit on its own. Many in-house developments are not aimed at winning but at alleviating anxiety.
Secondly, it’s mistaking technical difficulty for strategic value. Developing your own payment gateway sounds impressive and indeed requires professional talent, but this doesn’t mean it holds strategic value for your core business.
Perhaps a deeper psychological mechanism is people using “pseudo-effort” on the right to escape “real difficulty” on the left. Writing an insightful article is hard, solving clients’ real needs is hard; but tinkering with an AI writing workflow or configuring server environments both appear technically sophisticated and provide a fulfilling sense of “making progress”…
If something is already available on the market, you shouldn’t do it yourself; you should specifically do things that others haven’t done or even can’t do—which is actually a very high bar.
Wardley Maps: Integrating with Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the OODA Loop #
Interestingly, Wardley linked his method to Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the “OODA Loop” [3], a connection I found quite insightful upon hearing about it.
Sun Tzu’s Art of War, “Laying Plans” chapter, states: “Therefore, in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be appraised in connection with five fundamental factors: the first of these is the Moral Law; the second, Heaven; the third, Earth; the fourth, the Commander; the fifth, Method and discipline.” Wardley believes “Moral Law” (道, Dao) represents the company’s Purpose, i.e., its objectives and values; “The Commander” (将, Jiang) is leadership; “Method and discipline” (法, Fa) are organizational principles—and his map addresses the issues of “Heaven” and “Earth”: “Earth” (地, Di) is the terrain map, indicating where each of your business modules lies in the value chain and what stage of evolution it is in; “Heaven” (天, Tian) is the climate, meaning everything is evolving to the right.
Wardley connects Sun Tzu’s five factors with the OODA loop, forming a dynamic strategic cycle.
You can study the diagram above [3] yourself for further understanding.
In summary: your efforts must have a sense of the terrain.
【Concluding Poem】
The Earth beneath your feet, Heaven shifting right; Tools can be borrowed, your Way must be self-evident. What can be bought, need not become you; What defines you, cannot be lent to others.
Notes
[1] Wardley, Simon. “An Introduction to Wardley (Value Chain) Mapping.” Bits or Pieces?, 2015.
[2] Wardley, Simon. “Rebooting GDS.” Bits or Pieces?, 2018.