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.
Get started with this template right now.
Example Mapping Template
Works best for:
Product Management, Mapping, Diagrams
To update your product in valuable ways—to recognize problem areas, add features, and make needed improvements—you have to walk in your users’ shoes. Example mapping (or user story mapping) can give you that perspective by helping cross-functional teams identify how users behave in different situations. These user stories are ideal for helping organizations form a development plan for Sprint planning or define the minimum amount of features needed to be valuable to customers.
Product / Market Fit Canvas Template
Works best for:
Market Research, Strategic Planning, Product Management
The product/market fit canvas template is used to help product teams meet customer and market needs with their product design. This template looks at a product in two dimensions: first, how the product fits user needs, and second, how the fully designed product fits within the market landscape. This combined metric understands a product holistically from the way customers use and desire a product, to the market demand. By comparing customer and product qualities side by side, users should better understand their product space and key metrics.
Look Mock Analyze Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Product Management
Doing your homework (aka, the research) is a key step in your design process, and the Look, Mock, Analyze approach helps you examine, structure, and streamline that step. With this powerful tool you’ll be able to identify your strengths and weaknesses, what you did right or wrong, and whether you spent time efficiently. Our Look, Mock, Analyze template makes it so easy for you to discover inspiration, mock up designs, and get feedback — you can start by setting up your board in less than a minute.
Prototype Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Design Thinking
A prototype is a live mockup of your product that defines the product’s structure, user flow, and navigational details (such as buttons and menus) without committing to final details like visual design. Prototyping allows you to simulate how a user might experience your product or service, map out user contexts and task flows, create scenarios to understand personas, and collect feedback on your product. Using a prototype helps you save money by locating roadblocks early in the process. Prototypes can vary, but they generally contain a series of screens or artboards connected by arrows or links.
OODA Loop Template
Works best for:
Strategic Planning, Strategy
The OODA Loop template helps optimize decision-making processes by using four key stages- Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Its well-structured layout allows teams to systematically break down complex decisions, leading to a shared understanding of the decision-making workflow. One of the key benefits of the template is its ability to enhance collaboration. Teams can seamlessly contribute to and iterate upon the decision-making cycle in real time, resulting in more informed decisions and a more efficient process. The template provides a clear and visual representation of each stage, accelerating the decision-making process and fostering a collaborative environment where teams can work together to navigate challenges and make well-informed decisions.
Bang for the Buck Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Strategic Planning, Prioritization
The name pretty much says it—this Agile framework is all about helping you maximize efficiency by powering collaboration between product managers and dev teams. Together you can go over each to-do on the project agenda and evaluate them in terms of costs and benefits. That way you can prioritize tasks based on how much bang for your buck they deliver. This template is great for teams and organizations that want to make a strategic plan to tackle an upcoming sprint.