Wardley Mapping, Users and their Needs
When I started to learn about Wardley Mapping, I overlooked at an essential aspect of mapping that I assumed I knew.
I assumed I knew my users and their needs.
After some years practicing Wardley Mapping, I realized that the phase 1 of doctrine, stop self-destructive behavior, is way harder than I thought.
I assumed that I knew about the user and their needs because I was working on well established companies that already had product market fit (PMF).
When I moved back to startups pre-product market fit, I just found that not having a “stable” anchor changed how I practiced Wardley Mapping. And having to discover which are my users and their needs changed how I mapped.
I’m currently building Teamperature, a B2B SaaS that enables organizations to assess their team cognitive load.
We are pre-PMF, which means that our users and their needs are based on bets and hypothesis. Any new learning can change rapidly the landscape and improve our situational awareness.
I found some interesting behaviors of mine and how I treat stable and unstable user needs. These behaviors appeared when I was part of a small startup during 2020, during 2023 while I was building Enabling Flow, and now with Teamperature.
The next map is a simplification of my experience building products to verify PMF.
First. I start building an MVP to verify our competitive advantage, and I usually start finding some early adopters. The MVP is messy and it only does one thing.
What happens next and after receiving some feedback, I start extending the MVP to fulfill a functional journey end-to-end, and those user needs often are well known. Things like invite my teammates, assign roles, email notifications, …
Then, my focus swifts from verifying the competitive advantage to provide self-served experience product. I always think it will take less time than it actually takes, and it starts to create a constraint of investment into the MVP itself.
At some point, and based on usage, it starts to seem that the initial hypothesis is verified, but it isn’t. It is just taking longer to verify the churn.
A critical metric to know if a product has reached product-market fit is retention and churn.
So, I realized that my behavior towards building a product to verify PMF is:
I start lean by only building the minimum to show a PoC about what is the product about and gain feedback.
I custom-build an MVP that only addresses the hypothesis user need.
I move into building those expected features that are preventing further product adoption.
I realize that I’m investing too much time on expected user needs rather than actually verifying the business hypothesis.
I can tell how much the map is moving towards the wrong direction. When I am gaining way more situational awareness on the expected user needs rather than the hypothesis user needs, I know I’m focusing on the wrong side of the map.
On the other hand, I also sense when investing on the wrong area creates inertia to change. If I invalidate the hypothesis, then it could mean that I also need to drop several things that are stable, like the expected user needs. Which it will increase my sunk cost fallacy.
So, investing on expected needs give me the unrealistic sense of stability and going in the right direction. Which indeed makes it way more risky.
Wardley Mapping the landscape helps me realize that I’m repeating this behavior and help me keep focused on what’s important. Validating the business hypothesis.
It forces me to:
Challenge my assumptions.
Know my users.
Focus on user needs (the actual that will produce future ROI).
If you are using Wardley Mapping to understand your startup situation:
Are you challenging enough if you know your user needs?
What would happen if you actually verify that you aren’t addressing their actual needs?
Are you focusing on the right part of your map?
Are you using appropriate methods, or you are custom-building the wrong thing?
In case you want to share your wardley mapping situation and have a 30 min chat, you can schedule one using the following button.
Thank you a lot for reading this post 😄.
I love to read your feedback and opinions to help me improve. You can DM at my LinkedIn or just leave a comment using the following links: