Thread by @ofinker

Yesterday I gave a brief introduction about #WardleyMapping at a Scrum community event in Munich. As it's currently strong beer time, I used a simple brewery example.

So let's say we are a brewery and attempt to map our main product - the beer - from a customer's perspective. The customer becomes the anchor and he craves a bottle of our beer.

To create a bottle of beer you definitely need two more components: a bottle and beer. As we are a pretty big brewery (thanks to avid Bavarian drinkers!) we put those components into the quite industrialised space already. We make our own beer and we buy standardised beer bottles

We wouldn't be a brewery without brewing. And we need a brewmaster (good ones are not easy to find) with her team.

Bavaria has the famous "Reinheitsgebot", laws that say that beer may only consist of hops, barley malt, yeast and water. We have suppliers for all of those. The drinking water comes right out of the tap (and indirectly from the Alps, awesome!). It's a commodity. But what is this?

We really have custom made copper heaters for the process? Well, we have tradition. We have been using the same coppers for over 500 years. It takes specialists ages to build one in the old ways. No wonder we can't scale up!

Say we were to use state of the art coppers, what would that cost? And how quickly could we get another 10 of them? How easy is it to get them maintained? If we want to fulfill all the demand in our product, we decide to not build our own coppers anymore.

"Halt for a moment! What about our brand?" one might ask. Brand? Apparently the bottle of beer has more than just a bottle and beer. The brand and everything attached to it has considerable value for our product. Let's put that into our map.

But what affects brand? One of the most obvious things might be the taste profile. Good we have hired such an excellent brewmaster. She can surely help us with this problem, right?

But here's the thing: There's no right and wrong how the taste should be. We could commoditize the taste profile, make it easy to handle for most people. Or we could go the other way and make the taste even more distinguishable. Let's discuss!

Our brewmaster tells us she has recently tried a new hops variety from a local producer. It's a small producer but if we get exclusive access to their hops it would be sufficient for our production. We will need to find a new yeast culture for it though - but we have candidates!

Our head of marketing jumps in. "This sounds like fuzzywuss! Every beer tastes the same anyway to most people. Let's just make a beautiful design so our bottles stand out in the shelves!"

We go back to our map and plot it down. Fancy bottles sound nice, but what would it mean? Our cleaning machines can't clean all sorts of bottles and we'd also have to redesign all of our packaging and distribution processes. Could we handle it? How? What would we have to do?

Here our little thought experiment ends. It's easy to see that the maps don't provide us with answers. We need to make sense of them. But that's the beautiful thing - we can sit around them, point at things, ask questions, theorize and then decide on our next moves.

If you would like to hear this story (again) - just catch me at one of the meetups in Munich - or even better: come to the new #WardleyMapping community event I'm hosting and let's create some maps together!
meetup.com/Wardley-Mappin…