when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near — Sun Tzu
Mapping, fundamentally, is about bringing situational awareness to environments where it does not currently exist. I’ve had a lot of fun and recent success in using the Wardley Mapping framework to develop business strategy and turn a low situational awareness environment into a medium (and trying to be high) situational awareness environment. Knowing where the players and the resources are on the board, and how they feed each other, is critical to making holistic decisions about what moves we make and avoiding the narrative trap.
But the whole point of a map is to understand how and why you should move across it to accomplish your mission. Therefore, you are not only creating a defensible thesis of action, but also hypothesizing the outcomes.
When outcomes don’t match the hypothesis, teams are tempted to fall back to the narrative trap, looking for a new defensible path through the same map.
In these scenarios, our situational awareness was not as high as we thought it was, and our map was wrong in some way. We need to discover the unknown elements, understand them, and add them to the context of our decision making.
Agile software development is about exactly this approach: Discover, Integrate, Deploy, Repeat. At the business level, though, we generally remain pretty bad at the true Agile mindset. “Agile” has come to mean “rapidly changing”, not “rapidly learning” or more specifically “rapidly expanding my understanding of the landscape and ecosystem I’m competing in” which is the true point of Agile.
Tactical product management techniques bring continuous discovery via user acceptance testing to features on an execution level, and strategic management has to be just as active in testing hypotheses about the landscape and updating the resulting theory of action as new information is discovered. Continuous market research is one way to do this (sadly one that is frequently done poorly, i.e. focused on a narrative instead of a landscape), but qualitative analysis of sentiment and other weak signals is a powerful approach too.
On this map, I added a previously unmapped feature of EVs discovered through continuous market research: Social Image. This changes our landscape completely, by creating a new branch of requirements around evolving Access forward. Now we have to think about how Social Image components, such as perceptions about locations, design of the hard goods, exclusivity, virtue signaling, etc., impact our attack on Access. We also need to think about if and how we need to put pressure Social Image to create space for Access to move. This is exactly why your marketing is a feature of your product…
The takeaway: making CD/CI/CD explicit in the business
It is common to change the narrative or path through the same data when our outcomes don’t match projections, even in a high awareness environment, because we’re not actually updating our inputs and what we pay attention to.
This means that we need business-level frameworks for testing hypotheses, detecting early failures, and maintaining continuous discovery (updating our tracking and testing constantly!) and continuous integration of knowledge into our decision making and then into our product: learn, develop, ship, repeat. My product and dev teams are Agile, so my strategy should be too.
The business-side development pipeline includes telemetry, KPIs, and creating flexible intelligence organizations around constantly evolving business needs. Product and business leaders need a tight coupling to our DevOps practices as much as they do our customers.
CD/CI/CD:
Continuous Discovery, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment.
