Wardley · Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners

Where on the map
do you build best?

Twelve forced choices, about ten minutes, for you alone. There are no good or bad answers — but there is no way to pick all three, which is the whole point of it.

This is the evolution axis of a Wardley map: everything travels left to right, from nobody knowing whether a thing is possible to everybody depending on it working. The three roles are the three stops on that road.

Pioneer

"Is this even possible?"

Builds the crude thing that proves an idea can exist at all. Most attempts fail — that is the price of the ones that don't.

Settler

"Who actually needs this, and why?"

Takes the rough prototype and turns it into something people can rely on without asking whoever built it.

Town Planner

"How do we make this cheap and boring?"

Turns a working product into a utility: measured, automated, predictable, dull by design.

side by side	Pioneer	Settler	Town Planner
Produces	A crude prototype that proves a thing can exist	A product people trust, with users, docs and an ecosystem	A utility: SLAs, automation, volume, low unit cost
Wins by	Exploring fast, failing often	Listening, refactoring, productising	Measuring, optimising, removing variance
Failure rate	High, and expected	Moderate	Low, and unacceptable
Allergic to	Requirements, process, "what's the return on this"	Half-finished toys, and scaling before anyone has adopted it	Snowflakes, undocumented magic, surprises
Horizon	Weeks	Quarters	Years
Sounds like	"Let's just build it and see."	"Have you watched anyone actually try to use this?"	"What happens when this fails at three in the morning?"

Four things to understand

It isn't a ladder. A Town Planner is not a promoted Pioneer. The three are peers doing different jobs, and an organisation missing any one of them is stuck.
It measures attitude, not ability. All three can be brilliant engineers, and all three can be poor ones. This says nothing about how good you are.
The handover is theft, and it's meant to sting. Settlers take work off Pioneers before Pioneers feel finished. Town Planners do the same to Settlers. If nothing is being taken, nothing is moving.
Nobody is only one thing. You have a home base, not a cage. What's worth knowing is where your home base is — and whether the work in front of you matches it.

Part one — your instinct

For each set, mark the one statement that is most like you and the one that is least like you. Answer for how you actually work, not how you think you should.

MOSTLEAST

Part two — your actual work

Now forget preference. Split ten points across the three to describe what the last three months of your work really looked like or future work will requiere of you.

10 points left to place

0 of 12 sets answered

The gap

What to do with this

The label is the least interesting part. These three questions are the reason to have done it.

If your two pins sit close together, the risk isn't today, it's next year. Everything you build eventually moves right along that axis, and the work stops resembling the work you signed up for. Decide in advance whether you follow this thing right — or hand it over and go back left.
If they sit far apart, the useful question isn't which one to change. It's whether the mismatch is temporary and worth it, or whether it's simply the shape of the job. Those two have very different answers, and only you can tell them apart.
Either way, say it out loud to whoever decides what you work on. Most people can feel a role fitting badly without being able to name why, which makes it come out as a complaint. You can now say it in one sentence that describes the work rather than your mood.