David Anderson

Welcome, everyone. Today we'd like to talk to you about using Wardley Mapping with the Value Flywheel for combined business and technology evolution. We believe that despite all the change that has happened, there is still a wave of transformation on the way for many organizations. We believe that a serverless-first approach will help you and your company ride this wave and succeed.

Specifically, we're going to introduce something we call the flywheel effect. But first, let's do some introductions. My name is David Anderson. I'm an engineer with extensive enterprise, cloud, and leadership experience.

Mark McCann

My name is Mark McCann. I'm also an engineering cloud architect, and I'm passionately pursuing serverless-first and engineering excellence.

David Anderson

We are both part of the Wardley Mapping community, the serverless community, and we also have a big focus on product. We've been building a body of content around The Serverless Edge over the past year. We have a book coming out with IT Revolution Press next year, along with a third contributor, Mike O'Reilly.

Between the three of us, we have extensive experience in building systems and driving change. We believe serverless-first represents an evolution into a new way of working, that most companies will start using cloud technology to reduce their time to value and really drive business results.

As we said, the flywheel effect is the mechanism we are going to describe. It's a phrase from the Jim Collins book, "Good to Great," but it is a very accurate description of what we are observing. Before we get into that, let's explain what a flywheel is, because there's maybe one or two of you that need a refresher on 19th-century engineering. I know I did.

When power is inconsistent, a flywheel is used to absorb the energy and evenly distribute it in order to drive smoothly. We believe that both business and technology drivers should merge together. But something is required for that smooth progress to happen, and that's where a flywheel comes in. The last thing you want is business and technology energy canceling each other out, and we've seen that many times in our experience.

Mark McCann

Yeah, definitely. The thing is, we want to help your organization get this flywheel turning. You have to build up momentum going the right direction. It's really about improving your time to value, ultimately delivering sustainable results. But maybe let's talk about the flip side, right? What we have seen a lot over our careers is things like dev-versus-ops silos, tech-versus-product silos, unclear purpose, poor technical decisions, and short-term thinking. This all builds business, technical, and organizational debt. It clogs up your flywheel.

David Anderson

I don't know if you think this sounds complicated, but we've seen this a lot. So how do you build that long-term success? Mark and I have seen this in a whole bunch of companies we've been speaking to and working with over the years. Liberty Mutual, Coca-Cola, Taco Bell, Workday Software, iRobot, BBC, Ericsson, Fender, A Cloud Guru, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and loads of startups have figured this out. Has your company figured this out? Because the thing I believe is a lot of companies don't really know this flywheel exists, and are caught in the build trap and don't know their time to value. By the way, "Escaping the Build Trap" is a brilliant book by Melissa Perri. Thoroughly recommend it.

Mark McCann

We believe creating and visualizing this value flywheel is critical in today's business landscape. We also believe that Wardley Mapping is one of the best techniques to help you navigate through this change. We're going to talk you through this model and highlight it with an example later. Before that, it's important to point out this is neither ivory strategy nor operational efficiency. This is about having a real bias for action, aligned with the pragmatic, proven ways of working that we have seen.

This wheel is designed to spin many times, so don't feel that you need to do everything in phase two before moving on to phase three. Momentum and that bias for action is more important than anything else. Getting moving is really critical.

Phase one is all about purpose. It sounds easy, but do you know what you're trying to do? As a team, as a department, as an organization, do you really know what is valuable for your team, for your org, for your business?

Phase two covers challenge. Have you created that right environment for success? Is the right environment there to discuss what you need to get to and to challenge the thinking until it's good enough for you to succeed?

Phase three is about that next best action. You don't gold-plate or build things you don't need to. With real focus, you can get results quicker than you could ever imagine.

Phase four is about building for long-term value. There will be plenty of opportunities in the future, but you don't want to close them off because of some decisions you've made today that slow you down later.

David Anderson

In the past, Mark, Michael, and I have been thinking about this for many, many years, and I'd always thought of this as building blocks. But I think when you sit and show someone all these building blocks built, it just seems overwhelming, and it doesn't really convey the movement and that rapid iteration as you create each of these blocks and build on it. It doesn't show that bias for action that's critical for success.

So I'm moving away from the idea that these are building blocks. I think the idea that this is a flywheel that you need to keep turning is a nicer analogy, and we certainly found that this works for this type of thinking.

Mark McCann

Yeah. Building blocks are very static. A flywheel conveys movement, and that's critical because that bias for action, as we mentioned, is critical.

David Anderson

Let's walk through each of these four phases. The first is purpose. Rather than me rant on, Mark, why do you think purpose is important?

Mark McCann

Purpose, and we've seen this time and again, is really critical for that alignment on vision and strategy so that teams actually know that the work they're working on makes a difference, is aligned with the goals and KPIs and results of your business. We've seen too many times where teams haven't had this clarity of purpose, and they can't really articulate the thing they're working on or how it makes a difference to their overall business. It's really critical that they have that clarity of purpose.

One of the other big things that we've mentioned here around purpose is obsessing over your time to value. It really is critical that teams have the observability of how long it takes for a change to get to a real user, and making that really clear and making that feedback very actionable so that your teams can focus on minimizing and reducing that time to value overall.

David Anderson

We're touching on Wardley Mapping in this. For each of these phases, we have a suggestion for how you Wardley map this. For the first one, you Wardley map to gain situational awareness of the competitive environment you're in at the market level. You're putting a product to market. Who else is in the market? What's your differentiator? What's your chance of success? There's no point in having this fantastic organization with engineers and product people going crazy when you're going the wrong direction. So that idea of Wardley Mapping to map your market is absolutely critical.

Mark McCann

The next stage is challenge. Dave, instead of me waffling on, why is challenge important? Why is it critical for success?

David Anderson

The first thing you always see in any team is the environment for success. It's people in the teams. People build software. So do you have an environment where people can be at their best, and they can challenge each other responsibly without getting into a whole argument? That's really the thing. Sometimes it's referred to as psychological safety.

There's no point in knowing the right thing to do, but you're maybe afraid to say that. If you have that really supportive environment, you can build and react to those loops we've been talking about.

Again, this sociotechnical phrase is interesting. There's a socio, a people aspect of your system, and there's your technical. As engineers, we'll always default to technical, but the people part of that is, I would say, more important. Then your things like problem prevention, time to value: you've got to look at all this stuff together and figure out what's the best thing that will work. You can rarely code your way out of a problem, and that's really what we have seen over the years.

Mark McCann

Absolutely. Bringing those elements together has been critical. Having that holistic sociotechnical view of the system has been critical to get that flywheel turning.

Finally, on challenge, we think mapping is massive in vetting challenge. What we have seen in our experience is that with Wardley Mapping, people can challenge the map. They're not challenging the individual, so it becomes a lot safer for people to bring up new ideas, new topics, because leadership and people you work with can challenge that map. They're not challenging you as a person. We think mapping is critical here to gain that understanding of your organization, to look at your capabilities, look at your doctrine, to understand whether it is fit for purpose for where you're trying to get to. Will it help you realize your North Star and your long-term value? Mapping to gain that understanding and situational awareness of your organization capabilities is critical to really drive the flywheel forward.

David Anderson

Remember, challenge is a good thing. It's not bad. Challenge always helps you get to a better place. Stage three is next best action. Mark, what's your thoughts on this one?

Mark McCann

I think the next best action really shortcuts a lot of the waffly strategic frameworks that we've had in the past. What can you do now for rapid impact? What's the most important, most impactful thing you as an individual and as a team can do now for impact? Having that mindset is critical.

We believe having that serverless-first mindset and approach really enables your teams to focus on that business outcome and business impact. It also has the added benefits: it keeps your code low, keeps your security high, keeps your cost liabilities under control. We really think serverless-first is a game changer for helping you move rapidly in the right way, in a sustainable way. Removing developer friction is also a massive enabler for being able to execute that next best action. Consistently identifying and removing impediments to your development teams is one of the most effective paths to high performance. Your goal here is fast flow efficiency from idea to real user value and real impact for your business.

David Anderson

And so you reckon serverless is a good option to get that next best action, that immediate response?

Mark McCann

Absolutely. I think serverless has been a game changer in that regard. You can move at rapid speed without compromise.

David Anderson

You can do this in other approaches as well, but that serverless mindset we have found is just primed to move really quickly. You can do it with other things as well, but it's 10X, to use a phrase, with serverless.

Mark McCann

One of the big things that we keep reiterating is it's serverless-first. It's not serverless-only. If serverless doesn't fit your needs right now, there are plenty of compelling fallback options that you can take advantage of in the cloud.

Again, right tool for the job every time. One way to figure that out, again, go back to Wardley Mapping, is map out your tech stack and figure out: we've built this thing; we know we have it, but is that a good thing to build? Look for opportunities for evolution and impediments to remove. As a team, sit and figure that out. You'll always have some tech debt, but decide what's the best thing to act on. By Wardley mapping out your solution, you can figure out, okay, we'll need to build this because this is a differentiator, and we'll just rent something else. That's such a powerful technique to get some visibility into the space.

David Anderson

Then finally, with the first three elements of the flywheel turning, we get into long-term value. Dave, what do you think? What's the long-term value that we're going for here?

I think this is probably the most interesting one for me, because certainly over my career I've always had this in mind. You rarely get a requirement for long-term value sitting in a project, but you always know in the back of your mind it'll be easier if we just put this thinking in place.

I was always very popular in teams when I would come up with, "We should do this." Why? Because it's the right thing to do, but it's extra work. But a problem prevention culture means that you reward teams for doing the hard stuff up front and avoiding failure. It's not about rewarding heroes who stay up all night and get the system back online. You've already failed by that point.

Doing the hard yards early, which means your system doesn't go down, for us that's been Well-Architected. It's been massive in that. Embracing engineering excellence: take pride in your engineering, and build things when you have to and don't when you don't. Then there's another part of that, which is sustainability. If you can create low-carbon products and services and at a sustainable pace for your people, which leads to long-term sustainable business success, the flywheel is really turning then.

Mark McCann

Again, we use Wardley Maps here to really identify what those new opportunities are. Where are those new emerging areas of value that we should go after as a team, as an organization? What new threats are there that we need to counter? What new players are starting to emerge? What areas do we need to get out of? Mapping helps you identify the areas that are no longer value-add or no longer core to your business, and can give you good insights into where you should extract from. It also gives you those new points of evolution to start thinking about: how do we evolve from some of the custom-built things that we have over to more commodities, so that we can free up our people to work on that long-term value and the higher-order elements of our business?

David Anderson

We've covered that value flywheel effect and shown how it works. We've also talked about Wardley Mapping. So let's do a brief intro on mapping. We've explained most, but the important part of Wardley Mapping is this value axis along the bottom. We'll describe what that is, but first, to illustrate it, think of computers and companies.

In the 1950s, having a computer was novel and new. That was stage one: genesis. It was very rare to have a computer in a company. By the '70s, companies built their own computers and got ahead. They custom-built computers to give them capability. That's stage two: custom-built. In the '90s, computers were everywhere. They were getting better, more refined. There was a boom. That's stage three: getting to that product phase. And now stage four: a commodity. You don't even really buy them anymore. You rent them as a utility, which we now call cloud.

Mark McCann

Stage one is genesis. As Dave illustrated, that component is very poorly understood. It has a future value, but it's uncertain whether it will ever make it to commodity. The user thinks of this as exciting and surprising. We treat it with wonder.

Stage two is custom-built. We know how to build this component, and we're starting to learn about it. We're starting to get a formal understanding of it. It's in a forming market, and we are learning how to make money from it. It's leading edge, and if you have it, you're doing pretty well.

Stage three is product or rental. Things are starting to heat up. It's a growing market. It's getting more competitive. These things are highly profitable, and they need to be fit for purpose as consumption is wide. We listen to our customers and make these things better so people will buy more of these things that are in the product.

Stage four, the final stage, is commodity or utility. This component is widely used in a mature market. Having this is just the cost of doing business, and everyone understands it. There's little profit to be made, and the company needs to mass produce these things for big profits. So we're going to walk you through a worked example to bring this to life.

David Anderson

Super simple example: you've got a business running a conference. We're holding a conference today. Should be familiar with it. The first step with mapping is to sketch out a really simple value chain. You always start with a customer need, and they act as the anchor. The customer or attendee has a need for knowledge, and knowledge has a dependence on a conference. That's it. Super simple.

Moving forward, we take that value chain and drop it into the Wardley map. For the first phase of the flywheel, which is purpose, you want to see what that looks like. As I said, the attendee is the anchor for the map.

The Y-axis represents visibility. Things closer to the attendee are more visible. Things lower down are less visible. As a team, you want to spend more time on making sure the things closer to the customer are of value, and less time on the things that are away from the customer.

The beauty of maps is that the components can move across this canvas from left to right, and they evolve towards commodity as they become more industrialized. Quite simply, if there is an advantage to be gained from making something better, then it will move from genesis through to commodity. Market competition will force that to happen if there's value in doing so.

You can see here, we've placed conference to the left of product, as a physical conference has a lot of unique and specific factors. But the disruption that COVID has brought means that has quickly moved more to the right and become more industrialized as a virtual conference. But the customer need hasn't changed. The need for knowledge is still there. This is a very real problem, and one that you're all well aware of, especially as you're attending a virtual event right now. You all need this knowledge that this conference and this event is giving you. But how many of you would have actually traveled to Vegas? We don't know that, but there's probably a lot of people here on this virtual event that wouldn't have been here and wouldn't have been able to afford to travel to Vegas today.

Moving on to phase two, challenge. This is an interesting phase as you start to make some assumptions. We accept the virtual conference is then commodity and create a dependency on a platform. If we decided to custom-build that platform, it would be way over to the left, but it's still not very visible to the user. They don't care how you deliver the virtual conference experience. They just want to get the knowledge. At this point, if we talk about this as a team, we can test out the psychological safety of your environment and the appetite for change.

Wardley Mapping is a great way to facilitate a healthy, challenging debate on where this should be and what we should do about the platform as we tackle delivering this virtual conference. It really does invite that challenge because you're challenging the map, you're not challenging any individual.

When you take that next step, any platform you need will need enhanced audiovisual skills to give that content polish. This is a much better investment, investing in those AV skills, than trying to custom-build the platform, like create your own YouTube, for example. There's no comparable advantage in trying to recreate something that already exists that is very capable of providing the capabilities that you need. There's a much better return on investment in leveraging a platform that already exists out there.

Mark McCann

The platform argument, sorry, discussion, could literally go on for years. But having a map, the room can sit as you're working through this, pause that decision, and move forward. Eventually, with the completed map, the decision makes itself. It's obvious where the platform should sit. But you get through that in a day as opposed to three years.

David Anderson

The next phase is next best action. Again, with our serverless-first mindset, we'll rent, not build, a platform. Let's look back at the customer. It's a next best action approach. We spot there's a new need for access, real-time and on-demand. Real-time gives you improved speaker collaboration with speaker chat as a new feature. That's good that we can look at that from a platform perspective and have real requirements, not just wishlist requirements.

Remember, we're just mapping here. We've built a pretty accurate picture in minutes or hours as a team, and our investment has been low. We've only spent a few hours or minutes on this and knocking this around. Contrast that to if you went, "Oh, we're getting a platform," and then three months later, you realize that actually we don't need to custom-build our own platform. Mapping brings that situational awareness, it brings that challenge, and it's very quick, and the return on investment is very high for your org.

Mark McCann

So phase four is long-term value. As we are looking at long-term value, we can start to look ahead. Once this system is in place, maybe we can start getting clever with some personalization and create some curated content per attendee. This could open up new collaboration channels and enable things like co-creation of content, maybe even with the speakers.

There's much more access now because at this event, we're going to be speaking to you on speaker chat as we are presenting here. Maybe we can use that time to find some early adopters of the patterns and explore further use cases. We can find some like minds who are trying to tease out some capabilities or some terms, and we can use that. It's a valuable capability that has emerged there. It's not a primary need, but we need to think ahead of these things and start thinking, what is the new emerging value that we as a conference provider can grab?

David Anderson

As we close out the map example, there's a couple of things worth calling out. This is a template that we've been using for a long time. There are four elements to this. First is the value chain that we usually put down the left of the whiteboard or Miro, if you're doing this online. I've removed it from this picture. You get the map in the center, which is your focus of attention. Then the next thing we have is climatic patterns. These are things that affect the domain, that affect the industry, regardless of this customer or this company. Things are happening anyway. Finally, there are observations, which are the narrative from the map.

The climatic patterns for this map: COVID accelerates change. It sped it up. There's a raised expectation of premium content. People aren't going to sit at home and watch second-rate content. Time and work-life balance are important. The barriers to entry have lowered. Lots more people can attend this virtual event. You don't have to fly to Vegas. Isolation drives the need for more and a different type of connection. It's harder to connect when you're remote, so there's a new need appearing. Then there's risk from cyber threats. One attack and your event is destroyed. This is much worse, obviously, in a virtual event.

Mark McCann

Then finally, the observations. We use these observations really to drive what we are actually going to do about this. What is this map telling us? What actions is it compelling us to start thinking about?

The observations we have here are around that increased attendee-speaker interaction. The virtual platform has created a new value proposition. That speaker-to-attendee interaction is now easier, so we probably should do something about that and start capitalizing on that.

The Well-Architected practice helps problem prevention. Failure isn't an option on a virtual conference. You need this to be up, resilient, and highly available. The platform needs to be very robust, and you don't want to custom-build that for a few extra features. You want to leverage, and do your homework, but leverage a world-class capability that already exists out there and has those Well-Architected characteristics that you need to deliver a compelling virtual event.

That need for knowledge has really evolved to joining in as a community. We've always had a small portion of returning conference attendees who would think of an event as a community, where they could meet up with like-minded people and challenge each other and discuss ideas. But now that can be expanded greatly, and the community can be much more diverse and inclusive, and that's a big selling point for online virtual conferences. We've lowered the barrier significantly to entry for people who couldn't fly around the world to be part of some of these events. That's something that needs to be explored and actioned on: that need for knowledge, that need for being part of a community becomes greater.

David Anderson

Simon Wardley is the guy who created a bunch of this mapping stuff, so we should give him a nod. Simon says, "The idea of future possibilities through stepping stones is an important concept within strategy." Strategy is not about drawing a picture in January, forgetting about it, and writing something on the wall. It's not about what you do every second Friday in your planning meeting.

This flywheel shows a pattern of interaction and enables the team to map out the journey during execution. You get alignment and challenge in the room. If the map's wrong, just change it. It's only a drawing. The map represents a conversation, but it also uncovers very useful value and highlights blockers to your team's progress.

That's the flywheel effect. I hope that made sense and raised a few questions. The whole point of this is to map out the journey, and it shows the way you need to look forward and use bias for action to test your assumptions.

I think, and we both think, that a version of this flywheel exists in every single company, but many can't see it and therefore can't get it turning. Wardley Mapping is the key technique for building insight, and we've talked about the importance of next best action and tracking your own time to value. All this is covered in the book and in the blog of The Serverless Edge.

Thanks again for listening to the talk. My name's David Anderson.

Mark McCann

And I'm Mark McCann.

David Anderson

Again, this is just a taster of the content in our book, which is coming out next year from IT Revolution Press. There are a few case studies of companies in the book that have gotten this model working really well. We have lots of advice and illustrations for how this works, and again, there's content on the blog. We really value your feedback, and please reach out to us either at this event on chat or on social media at the tags there.

We believe that this wave of transformation has still not hit most companies. Yes, you migrate into the cloud, but have you really thought about how technology will drive your business when you get there? Thanks very much.

Mark McCann

Thank you.