wardley-maps.sgit.ai / Start here
Start here
This site is not an introduction to Wardley Mapping and should not try to be — Wardley Mapping 101 does that better in fifteen minutes, and the book does it best of all. What this page is: the ladder from "I have read the introduction" to "I can argue about a placement", which is the rung nothing in the ecosystem currently covers.
Six rungs
What a map is
Anchor, position, evolution, the four stages. This belongs to Simon Wardley and this site does not rewrite it — partly because his book says it first and better, and partly because restating CC BY-SA material as though it were ours would infect this page's licence. So: read chapters 1–6, or Mapping 101 if you want the short version. Then come back.
How to read one
Three named techniques, each of which changes what you see in a map you already have. User needs first — anchor on what somebody actually wants, not on your architecture. Paired before/after maps — draw it twice, once as reality and once with your change in it, because "the distance between the two is the case for the service." And the commodity illusion: "a lot of things that feel like a commodity or a product to the user are actually very weak and very immature behind the scenes." Map the experience and the implementation as separate chains and look at the vertical gap. The detail →
How to write one that survives review
Two mechanical rules and two editorial ones. Mechanical:
coordinates are [visibility,
evolution], and quote every name
everywhere. Editorial: a map is a claim, not a picture — so say what would
falsify it — and do not overclaim. The test the corpus sets for itself is worth
stealing: "Is there a map that shows us badly? Worth drawing, as the test of whether
these are analysis or marketing."
The gallery, where every map states its falsifier →
Where doctrine bends
The site's centre of gravity, and the first rung where you are being offered arguments rather than instruction. Custom axes and the evolution-versus-maturity rule · de-commoditisation · you cannot map a gap. Four opinionated pages, each naming what would change its mind. The four claims →
Maps as organisation
Pioneers–Settlers–Town Planners, applied twice: to three literal AI agent teams, and — more usefully — to artefacts rather than to people, which is where the skill lifecycle turns the framework into an operational cost diagnostic you can read off an invoice.
Maps as data
The most architecturally ambitious rung and the least implemented. A map is a graph with positional metadata; map queries are graph queries with positional filters. Labelled as design, not as shipped, because there is no implementation of it anywhere. Then the machine surface, which is the part of this that does exist.
The one idea to take away
A Wardley map is a claim, not a picture: it asserts where each component sits on the evolution axis and is therefore arguable.
Everything on this site follows from taking that seriously. Maps in git rather than in a slide. Coordinates in text rather than in an image. Evidence attached to placements — or an admission that there is none. A doctrine assessment where every rating names the artefact it rests on. And a resource index that publishes the date it last checked, because a claim about the world that nobody re-checks stops being a claim and becomes folklore.
The corollary is the uncomfortable one: almost nobody publishes their maps anywhere they can be argued with. They live in slide decks, in workshops, in tools that shut down. MapKeep shut down on 30 May 2026, and whatever was only in MapKeep went with it.
Where to go next
The glossary
35 concepts with the words they were first stated in, classified as standard doctrine, extension, or original — so you can tell what is Wardley's and what is an argument.
Read →34 resources, verified
With three routes through them, and eleven obituaries for things the community's own index still lists as live.
Read →What doesn't ship
Read this before trusting anything above. It is the page that says which parts of this site are artefacts and which are arguments.
Read →