Serverless Craic Ep38 It began with the forging of the Great Maps and Simon Wardley

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

It began with the forging of the Great Maps and Simon Wardley

We've been talking this week about Wardley mapping. Simon Wardley features in our book 'The Value Flywheel Effect'.

Where did you first hear about Wardley Mapping?

I first heard Simon Wardley talking at cloud conferences about early cloud. I remember an open source conference and a 20 minute video. Simon was really funny, which actually helped. When he presented it came across as common sense. Like, why would you do anything else?

The bigger question is why were we looking for this type of stuff? Or why did it resonate with us? I think we were at a certain point in our careers. We had been engineers for a while. And we thought there's got to be a bigger picture here that we're not quite grasping. Simon Wardley started writing his book in 2016. I went to Lean Agile Scotland in October 2016. And he did the talk in person. I had seen his talk a couple of times, but it didn't really click until I sat and watched it in real life.

I've always liked the idea of a group of people drawing a diagram to understand something. I think that is really powerful. Remember, there was a time when we said we need to stop using PowerPoint! We need to get people into rooms to have conversations and working sessions.

I refined and improved my ability to do Wardley Maps through teaching. There were people who hadn't experienced mapping. Or if we had visitors or customers in the building, you'd get them into the end room with the big white wall and just start talking. You would try to teach them what a map was. And what each position meant. Or even just have a conversation.

There's another important step. You move from doing it yourself to doing it in a group environment. When you are looking at a map you are figuring it out. When you do it in a group environment, the group will ask about this and that. And that's when it really starts to click. For me, the two big things are:

1. Start with a customer need. I remember a team were stuck for six months because they didn't know who the customer was.

2. The four phases of evolution or access (Genesis, Custom Built, Product, Commodity). Get your head around that concept.

One of the other pitfalls we fell into was mapping too much detail. We went too low level. And then someone came along and zoomed us out, by saying 'you don't need those five components. Here's just one!'.

Practice, practice, practice is the big lesson here. We knew we were starting to get good when we were able to roll it out across multiple teams to map out the tech stack. They were getting value and getting excited about doing it. And we were getting lots of feedback on what did or didn't work. We were in offices and I would draw maps on the board. It was all very collaborative. But now we have the emergence of good online collaboration tools like Miro etc.

Another important lesson is that senior people just want to hear what you are going to do. They don't want to know how you figured it out. If they say why are you doing that? You can go through the map in your head and say that you've thought about it. If you say this is what we are going to do and here's the outcome, you don't need to show them all your work.

When we started mapping there wasn't much about apart from the odd presentation. Now there's lots of material out there. The community is growing. You can google and look up YouTube. And there's online conferences as well like Map Camp. Those videos are available soon as well. A lot of Simon Wardley's maps are readily available on GitHub.

A lot of the work in UK.Gov carried out by Liam Maxwell and others still stands the test of time. If you look at the UK government's digital footprint, it's still in there on freely available materials. Their work is permeated with thinking about user needs, understanding value chains and situational awareness and mapping.

For resources look at Simon Wardley on Twitter @swardley and his pinned tweet. Simon has a book: 'Wardley mapping'. He is on Medium at 'wardleymaps'. There's a whole bunch of stuff including free articles. They're fairly meaty but they're good.

John Grant keeps a list of maps on GitHub, which is list.wardleymaps.com.

Ben from @hiredthought is also at learnwardleymapping.com. And of course, our book, 'The Value Flywheel Effect' is coming to a store near you soon.

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai