The AI Wardley Mapping Strategist skill for Claude

The AI Wardley Mapping Strategist is a free skill from the library of 100 skills that we make available from the AI and automation service. A skill is an instruction file, SKILL.md, that gives an AI assistant a fixed method for one task. No software, no account, no connection: one text file of 1,860 words that teaches Claude how to apply the mapping method of Simon Wardley to your business, product or service. What a skill is exactly and how that works technically you can read in what Claude skills are; this page is about what this particular skill does and why you would want it.

The problem it solves is familiar to anyone who has ever had to make a strategic choice: build or buy, invest or outsource, hold on or let go. Most of those choices are made on gut feeling, in a meeting, with the most confident voice as the winner. Wardley Mapping replaces that gut feeling with a map.

Two axes do the work. The vertical axis shows your value chain: what the user sees at the top, the invisible infrastructure at the bottom. The horizontal axis shows evolution: every component moves from Genesis, new and not understood, through Custom Built and Product to Commodity, fully standardised. On a map you see at a glance what your moat is, what you should buy instead of build, and where the market is shifting underneath you.

It is based on the work of Simon Wardley, who has made his method freely available online under Creative Commons since 2015, and builds on the doctrine and gameplay principles from his book about topographical intelligence in business. The file states that provenance itself, with a source list. So you get no summary of a management book but a workable instruction: six steps, with the questions the skill asks per step, the signals it watches for and the fixed format in which the result appears.

One thing up front: the skill is strict. One user, one primary need, at least eight components, and every stage estimate is tested with the question whether you could buy the component elsewhere. That strictness is not a quirk but the whole point, because a vague map gives vague strategy.

Most strategy documents are lists: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, action points. Lists have one fundamental problem: they show no position and no movement. You know you do seven things, but not how those things depend on each other and which way they are moving. A SWOT analysis is a photograph; a Wardley Map is a map of the terrain with a weather forecast attached.

The map shows dependencies. In step three the skill connects every component with what it needs in order to function. That sounds administrative, until you see what it lays bare: the service your clients pay for leans on a component you never give any attention, or on a freelancer who could walk out tomorrow. A component hanging off nothing is, according to the doctrine of the skill, suspect: either it is not part of your value chain, or you have forgotten a dependency.

The map shows evolution, and evolution is not optional. On that point the file is firm: components cannot stand still. The evolutionary pressure is universal, everything moves from Genesis to Commodity. The question is not whether your custom built solution will ever become a product anyone can buy, but when, and what you do at the moment it happens. Anyone who sees that coming on a map can react years earlier than someone who only notices when revenue drops.

The map makes inertia visible. Every analysis closes with inertia warnings: which assumptions in your organisation are still attached to an old position on the map. "We build everything ourselves" was an advantage while the component was custom; it becomes a cost the moment the same component is on sale as a product. Inertia is, according to the file, the most important reason companies lose when a component evolves. That is exactly the kind of warning you would rather get from a map than from your annual figures.

In diff form, with lines pointing to the example from the skill: how the same question sounds without a map and with one.

A skill is only as good as its instructions, so we simply describe them here. The file opens with frontmatter that decides when Claude picks the skill up: not only at "make a Wardley Map", but also at questions such as what should I build myself and what should I buy, where is my moat, what does my value chain look like, or which part of my business has become a commodity. Ask something like that while the skill is installed and you get it automatically. How you build such an instruction file yourself is in writing a SKILL.md.

Then follow the six steps. Step one sets the anchor: who is the end user and what is their most important need. Here it is strict: one user, one primary need, because without a correct anchor the rest is worth nothing. Step two collects components: activities, practices, data, knowledge and technology, and the instruction says literally that it does not stop before at least eight are on the table, because an empty map says nothing. Step three draws the dependencies: which component needs which other component, with the user need at the top and every layer below it connected.

Step four places every component on the evolution axis, and this is where the file gets most concrete. Per stage, the signals by which you recognise it are written out. Genesis: few players, no price point, hype and uncertainty, papers on arXiv. Custom: companies build their own versions, consultants sell implementations, scarce talent. Product: SaaS solutions appear, different price points, comparisons on G2. Commodity: utility pricing, little differentiation, focus on reliability and cost. And because almost everyone rates their own work as too innovative, the skill adds a test question: can I buy this elsewhere?

Step five is the only step in which the skill asks you nothing: it does the gameplay itself. On the basis of the map it decides which teams belong with which components according to the three-way split Pioneer, Settler and Town Planner, walks through six classic strategic moves from Wardley's doctrine, and checks for inertia: organisational attachment to an old position. Step six delivers the output in a fixed format of seven parts: the anchor, the map in text, a components table with visibility and stage, strategic moves with the reason and the first step this week per move, climatic forecasts for one to three years, inertia warnings and the questions you still have to answer.

It closes with six doctrine principles that count as hard rules, the source credits to Wardley's freely available work and the licence: MIT, keeping the source credits to TheSEO and Simon Wardley. More on that doctrine below, because that is where the character of this skill sits.

Wardley Mapping is not a management fashion with a certification programme but an open method. Simon Wardley has published his work online since 2015, freely available under Creative Commons, and the SKILL.md names his three sources: the book about Wardley Maps as topographical intelligence in business, the Medium series "On being lost" in which Wardley describes how he discovered as a CEO that he was navigating without a map, and the doctrine, his collection of forty universal principles for effective organisations from 2018.

That provenance explains the tone of the skill. Wardley did not write his method as a consultancy product but as a correction to his own blind spot: he ran a company, could answer every question about revenue and team, and had no answer to the question why he chose one strategy and not another. That map became his answer, and the doctrine is the distillation of what kept going wrong at companies without one. Six of those principles are carried over as hard rules, which you see in action in the next section.

For completeness: the skill itself is under the MIT licence and is free to use, adapt and distribute, keeping the source credits to TheSEO and Simon Wardley. So you may also use it in your own advisory practice.

Which of the neighbouring skills you reach for next depends on the question. If the map shows that everybody in your terrain is moving the same way, the next question is where nobody is standing yet, and that is the job of the Blue Ocean Strategy Coach. To lay the framework beside other strategy instruments, the SWOT analysis skill and the PESTEL Analyst skill are in the same library: the first for the photograph of your current position, the second for the forces from outside. Of the three, the Wardley Map is the only one that shows movement.

The zip contains one folder with the SKILL.md inside it. Installing is a matter of putting the file in the right place, and that place differs per environment. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same skill also works in Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI. You are therefore not downloading a Claude file but a working instruction that any modern AI assistant can read. The full guide per environment is in installing Claude skills.

After that, use is simple: describe your business or product and ask for a Wardley Map, or simply ask the question you are stuck on, such as what should I build myself and what should I buy. It asks its own questions per step and carries on until the map satisfies the doctrine. New to this kind of file? Start at the knowledge base for the broader explanation of working with AI.

This one is at its strongest on strategic choices in which dependencies and evolution play a part. Develop in house or outsource. Buy or build. Choosing a platform strategy. Understanding why a competitor suddenly gives away for free what you sell. Specifically useful, says the file, for business owners making these kinds of decisions while technology or markets shift. That is exactly the moment when a list falls short and a map makes the difference.

There are also situations where you are better off leaving it alone. If you have no idea who your user is or what their primary need is, the skill holds you at step one and no map appears: that is not a failure of the method but the honest signal that a more fundamental question is waiting.

Size matters as well. For an operational decision without dependencies, such as the choice between two comparable tools, a whole map is overkill: there the Two-Way Door Decider skill is the fitter instrument, because it first tests how reversible the decision is. And anyone who wants to analyse the forces from outside, from politics to technology, is better off with the PESTEL Analyst: that one looks at the weather, the Wardley Map at the terrain.

The most important limit sits in the nature of the instrument, and the skill names it itself in its doctrine: the map is always provisional. It is only as good as the information you supply about your components and their stage, and it is an instrument for a conversation, not an oracle.

So the document is not the point. The value is not in the map as a document but in the conversation it forces: why does this component sit there, why do we think this is our moat, and what do we do when it shifts to the right. Make the map once and frame it, and you get little out of it. Update it every quarter and you see shifts coming before they show up in the revenue.

A good map almost always shows the same thing: your visibility in search engines and AI answers is a component your revenue leans on, and it is shifting along the evolution axis. If you want to know where that component sits today for your site, the free SEO scan shows it in a few seconds. In the guide which strategy model when you can see how this model relates to the others. And if you want to talk further about what AI can do for your business, from separate skills to full automation, we simply do that in a conversation.