Mapcamp notes

Drew Firment:

I was mapping cost efficiency vs architectural optimisation - not the axes in Simon's maps

ask yourself "does what I'm spending time on matter?" rebooting servers, updating versions - no-one cares - serverless means you have no-ops

we have 600k customers, 6.5M lambda invocations daily, and costs $550/month for serverless fees

Dr Sal Freudenberg:

Collaboration through (even really quite rubbish) mapping - even flawed maps can be very useful

"all maps are wrong. They are a vehicle for communication" says @swardley - they bring up the elephant in the room, and the other elephants holding their tails

Mapping is about distributed cognition - knowing doesn't reside in a single person, but in a sociocultural world that the map is a part of

Maps can be a boundary object - just structured enough to maintain a common identity, but interpreted differently across communities

Gen Ashley:

Who is mapping for

🌈 Rachel Murphy🌈:

Mapping is a language that everyone can understand - with Wardley maps, you can put it on a wall and people start moving things around

Danielle H-Wilson:

Mapping is not just for technologists - it not just build versus buy, it is bigger than that

Ben:

mapping is wibbly enough that you can find the boundaries of what you are thinking about

Dr Sal Freudenberg:

the starting point for mapping for me has been "there's a puzzle - we don't want know what to do next"

Q:

What's the one gotcha I should look out for the first time?

🌈 Rachel Murphy🌈:

the component parts of the value chain are the tricky bit - sometimes it's bleeding obvious, sometimes it's tricky

Danielle H-Wilson:

don't try and make it perfect or too precise - get it down and then change it

Dr Sal Freudenberg:

make sure you have the right people in the room - don't try and do it on your own but collaborate

Q:

if there are only one or two of you haw do you do it?

🌈 Rachel Murphy🌈:

I did that when I joined Different - we dragged in people from our coworking space to help us work it out

Ben:

I found mapping helpful as an individual, because it can help you back up what you propose with sound logic

Dr Sal Freudenberg:

if you don't have enough people, think about personas and try to map from their perspective

🌈 Rachel Murphy🌈:

I worked with organisations that didn't have clue from a strategic perspective, and this gave us a way to talk about it

Simon Wardley:

Mapping was something I did for myself as a CEO - I thought everyone else had maps as I hadn't done an MBA. That's why I made it creative commons

Q:

what other tools are complementary to mapping?

🌈 Rachel Murphy🌈:

putting an architecture diagram and a wardley map side by side can help executives to understand both better

Danielle H-Wilson:

when we did some maps in the office we would have the team doing the map round the board, and others would watch, and then want their own

Q:

why not present other mapping techniques?

Simon Wardley:

I'd love to present other maps and not graph diagrams that don't have navigational characterisations

I would love for people to find better ways of mapping - mine are primitive and I made them creative commons so someone else can fix them

Thank you Jen - @coderinheels for organising this today

Gen Ashley:

I want to get more women in tech, and I want to have more workshops for women on mapping