Your custom Airflow setup is not a competitive advantage. Your customer analytics model might be.
Most data teams treat every capability the same. Same investment. Same attention. Same level of custom engineering. That’s expensive and it’s often wrong.
Wardley Mapping forces a simple question: is this novel or commodity? The answer changes everything about how you invest.
X-axis: evolution from novel to product to commodity. Y-axis: value chain from infrastructure to customer.
Custom ML models for your specific domain? Novel. Invest. Experiment. Accept uncertainty. A managed data warehouse? Product. Buy it. Don’t build your own. Logging and monitoring? Commodity. Outsource it. Reduce cost.
The twist I keep seeing: teams overspend on commodity capabilities because they built them years ago and it feels like “theirs.” Your hand-rolled orchestration isn’t strategic. It’s familiar. That’s not the same thing.
Do this as a group exercise. If one person draws the map alone, they’ll put their own domain in “novel.” Every time.
Start with 5 capabilities. Place them honestly. The arguments about where things land are the point.
What data capability are you building in-house that you could buy off the shelf?