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A deck from the article of the same name
Why I love Wardley maps
The explanation, using the maps drawn on this site as the examples. Twelve slides.
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Why I love Wardley maps
The best of the maps drawn on sgit.ai, with the context each came from, and the reasons the technique matters to me.
Dinis Cruz, 12 October 2026. Every placement on every map is a claim, not a measurement.
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A map is a graph with two kinds of context
Down the page: a value chain. A person and a need at the top; under them, the things that need exists on; under those, what they stand on.
Across the page: evolution. How far each piece has travelled from a new idea to something bought by the unit.
Nothing else about the drawing matters much. Those two directions are what make it useful.
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The evolution axis is a choice
Genesis, custom built, product, commodity is Simon Wardley's scale and the one on every map here.
It is not the only one. Risk can be the axis. Data can be the axis. Governance can be the axis. The map places things against a scale you chose because it answers your question.
In 2022 I gave a talk at the Open Security Summit called Why Wardley Maps changed how I think: eleven shifts in how a problem is seen. This deck is the shorter list I use now.
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Every dot is a claim about something real
A map you cannot be wrong about is a diagram.
Every placement here says: this thing exists, it sits there in the chain, and it is about that mature. The caption says so, and the footer says "a map, not a measurement".
That is why the maps are useful in an argument: there is something to disagree with, line by line.
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Altitude: are you polishing the wrong layer?
Most effort goes into components the user never touches. The vertical axis shows it.
On the left of this map is a blob of six things rebuilt by hand in a prompt every session, three layers under the need. Files, hashes and git sit at the far right, unused.
The question is always: what moved this week, and did anything above it notice?
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Build or buy, settled by the column
Product or commodity: buy it, rent it, vendor it.
Genesis or custom built, on your path to the user: build it, because nobody else will build it the way you need.
Most build-or-buy arguments are two people drawing the same component in different columns. Here everything new is on the left and every one of them stands on something on the right that already existed.
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Does the market exist?
The question most people have never asked of their own product.
A commoditised layer is a hard sell. The buyer already has it, cheaper, from somebody with a bigger name.
A layer where everyone is custom building on top of a commodity is a market. Each of those builders would rather buy.
The map answers differently for the two businesses on this site.
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Two answers: sgit and RiskMandate
sgit
Storage, version control, encryption: all commodities, all hard to sell on their own.
Above them, everyone wanting a private, versioned, shareable unit of work is custom building one. That is the vault.
The market is the custom building above the commodities; the product lets a customer keep building above a vault instead of below it.
RiskMandate
A product: mandate, footprint, behaviour policy, the record of what an agent did against what it was allowed.
In the last year agents became a commodity. The dot below moved right, so the opportunity moved up.
Agent behaviour is all genesis and custom built today, inside prompts and spreadsheets. That is the shape of a market that exists.
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Flow, attrition, and where to hook
A map shows the flow from the need down to what serves it, and where the flow leaks: the dependencies that are slow, immature, or owned by somebody else.
The commodity end has names. Apple, Google, Stripe, git. Drawing them puts the people you depend on and the people you could plug into on the same page as your own pieces.
Where to hook: which mature component can you stand on, so that your custom piece is small?
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A common language, and many maps
Two people with a map argue about positions. Two people without one argue about words.
This business was mapped twice, from the outside and from the inside, because each side of the team sees a different chain. The two maps made the difference discussable.
None of the maps is the map. A user's chain, a team's chain, a feature's chain, a day's chain; this site has nine so far because that is how they are used.
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Every node is a map
Zoom into a dot and it becomes the anchor of the next map, at the same place on the evolution axis, because the maturity of a thing does not change when you look inside it.
Three altitudes of this business: the vault is a dot on the business map and the anchor of the vault map; the door is a dot on that one and the anchor of the door map.
It goes up as well as down. Above the business map is the market it sits in. Choose the altitude first, then the dot.
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Peace, and an invitation
Once a thing is on a map, placed and connected, I stop carrying it in my head. Most of the anxiety turns out to be about things far from the user.
Everything in this deck is published: the maps as source, the figures as data in every article's graph at sgit.ai/articles/graphs.json, and the article this comes from.
If you map, and any of this is wrong, that is exactly what the maps are for: agent@riskmandate.ai.
The other deck: Reading one map. The article both come from: Why I love Wardley maps. Every map is a claim by its author, not a measurement.