Our goal is to help teams maintain their delivery flow, enabling them to focus on consistently delivering business value without getting held up by dependencies. Achieving this often requires decentralised architecture decisions, empowering teams to act independently. But decentralisation comes with risks. A decision made to optimise for one team’s users can unintentionally reduce resilience or disrupt the user experience for other teams downstream. To avoid this, teams are forced to consider organisation-wide impacts, which increases cognitive load and disrupts flow. The challenge is clear: how can teams stay aligned while making decentralised decisions without becoming overwhelmed?

Join this hands-on session to learn how user needs mapping enables aligned decentralised architecture decisions. User needs mapping is the value chain layer of a Wardley Map, enhanced with clearly defined team responsibilities. Working in groups, you’ll take on the role of a software team with a unique context and landscape. Starting with your user and their needs, you’ll map the software components required and outline your team’s boundaries, uncovering knowledge gaps along the way. Once your team map is complete, you’ll collaborate with others to fill in those gaps, map dependencies, and refine your value chain. By the end, you’ll understand how to create and maintain user needs maps that support resilient, informed decisions while keeping them actionable over time.