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.
User Flow Example
Works best for:
Flowcharts, Mapping, Diagrams
The User Flow Example template offers a visual representation of a typical user flow within a digital product or service. It provides elements for documenting user interactions, navigation paths, and decision points along the user journey. This template enables UX designers and product teams to understand user behavior, identify pain points, and optimize the user experience. By providing a concrete example of user flow, the User Flow Example template serves as a valuable reference for designing intuitive and engaging digital experiences that meet user needs effectively.
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.
BCG Matrix Template
Works best for:
Strategic Planning
Use the BCG matrix template to make informed and strategic decisions about growth opportunities for your business. Assign your portfolio of products to different areas within the matrix (cash cows, dogs, question marks, stars) to prioritize where you should invest your time and money to see the best results.
UML Class Messaging System Template
Works best for:
UML
The UML Class Messaging System Template streamlines the process of designing and analyzing messaging systems. It allows users to visually map out the structure of a system by detailing classes, their attributes, operations, and the relationships among objects. This template is particularly useful for illustrating the functionality of a messaging system, including the management of text messages, conversation threads, user contacts, notifications, and channels. It offers a clear visual representation of how all these elements interact within the system, making it an invaluable resource for developers, designers, and stakeholders aiming to enhance communication and reduce errors in the development phase.
Cross Functional (Swimlane) Chart
Works best for:
Flowcharts, Mapping, Diagrams
The Cross Functional (Swimlane) Chart template offers a visual tool for mapping out processes or workflows with multiple stakeholders or functional areas. It provides swimlanes for organizing tasks and responsibilities by department or role. This template enables teams to visualize process flows, identify handoffs, and improve coordination and collaboration across functions. By promoting transparency and accountability, the Cross Functional (Swimlane) Chart empowers organizations to streamline workflows and drive cross-functional alignment effectively.
Product Canvas Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, UX Design
Product canvases are a concise yet content-rich tool that conveys what your product is and how it is strategically positioned. Combining Agile and UX, a project canvas complements user stories with personas, storyboards, scenarios, design sketches, and other UX artefacts. Product canvases are useful because they help product managers define a prototype. Creating a product canvas is an important first step in deciding who potential users may be, the problem to be solved, basic product functionality, advanced functionalities worth exploring, competitive advantage, and customers’ potential gain from the product.