The 45-Minute Market Map

Most small business strategy discussions have a weird problem. They happen in a vacuum. You’ll see a familiar parade of frameworks: boxes, bullet points, tidy categories. “Capabilities.” “Capacity.” “Initiatives.” “Investments.” Everything gets typed into neat little containers. However, the missing ingredient is usually the one that matters most: context.

Where is the market going? What are competitors doing? Where is the ground already occupied? Where is it wide open? Most “strategy templates” don’t show you any of that. The context stays trapped in people’s heads, unevenly shared, and politely avoided until it bites you. That’s not strategy. That’s group journaling with a spreadsheet. What businesses, both small and large, need more than another framework is simpler and far more useful: a map.

Why a map beats a framework

If you were hiking unfamiliar terrain, you wouldn’t plan your route using a checklist and a few blank boxes. You’d want to see:

• Where you are

• Where the high ground is

• Where the hazards are

• Where other people are already camped out

• Where the open routes still exist

Business is no different. When you can see your competitive terrain, better questions show up naturally:

• Should we go head-to-head or go around?

• Is that market crowded, or just loud?

• Are we trying to compete where the big players have already built fortresses?

• Where is there space for a smaller business to survive and thrive?

A map doesn’t magically give you the “right” answer. It does something more important: it stops you from making decisions based on invisible assumptions.

The “45-minute market map” idea

The concept is simple: in about 45 minutes, you can sketch a rough market map that makes your options easier to see. This is not a “data science project.” It’s not a perfect picture. It’s a fast, shared snapshot of reality that helps you stop guessing. A useful map for small businesses can be built on two dimensions that show up in almost every market.

Dimension 1: Where is your product in its business evolution?

Most offerings evolve in a predictable direction:

1. Innovation: new ideas, new approaches, experimental offerings

2. Custom: bespoke work tailored to specific clients

3. Product: repeatable, packaged offerings you can sell again and again

4. Commodity/Utility: standardized and price-driven, widely available

This matters because each stage has different economics. If something is truly commoditized, competing there usually turns into a scale and margin war. Small businesses can win those sometimes, but only with a real advantage. Otherwise, it’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight. If competitors are innovating, you have a choice:

• innovate too (high risk, potential high reward), or

• avoid the chaos and win through reliability, specialization, or productization in a niche

The important question isn’t “what should we build?” It’s “Where are we in the lifecycle, and where is everyone else?”

Dimension 2: Are you customer-facing, or enabling others?

The second dimension is about where you sit relative to the end customer:

• Customer-facing: you’re directly in the buyer’s line of sight

• Enabling/back-end: you support other businesses, systems, or channels that face the customer

This matters because the competitive pressure is different. Customer-facing markets often reward brand, marketing, and experience. Enabling markets often reward reliability, integration, and trust. And sometimes the smartest move is to pick the side your competitors aren’t paying attention to. If everyone is fighting in the “front of house,” you might win by becoming the supplier. If everyone is building tools for other businesses, you might win by owning a narrow, high-value customer-facing niche. Again: not “one is better.” The point is to see the shape of the fight before you pick one.

These ideas, are taken from something called Wardley Maps. They are quite sophisticated, and if you are interested, you should definitely check out Simon Wardley's work. However, in my experience, you don't really need to make it all that complicated. Just about any visualization is better than nothing.

What the map really gives you: options

Businesses don’t fail because they lack effort. They fail because they spend effort in the wrong place. A quick market map helps you:

• spot where competitors are clustered (and where they aren’t)

• see whether you’re drifting toward a commodity trap

• identify where productization could create leverage

• find niches where being smaller is an advantage, not a handicap

Most importantly, it changes the tone of strategic planning. Instead of debating opinions, you’re debating a picture. That’s healthy conflict and it helps creates faster alignment.

The part that turns a map into strategy: movement

Markets don’t sit still and here’s the key idea: products tend to evolve over time.

Innovation becomes custom work. Custom work becomes products. Products become utilities.

That flow isn’t random. So, the strategic question becomes: If the market is going to move, where do we want to be positioned as it shifts? Sometimes you ride the slope. Sometimes you avoid it. Sometimes you move sideways into a niche others haven’t reached yet. But you can’t do any of that without seeing the terrain.

Why this matters right now

The hidden killer for many small businesses isn’t lack of hustle. It’s spending months building something that the market has already commoditized, or picking a fight with competitors who have scale, capital, and distribution you can’t match.

Remember, you don’t have to dive into Wardley Maps – any visualization is probably better than none, a rough sketch of the competition and their products will go a long way to helping you to get a better picture of the marketplace - and that’s really all you need.

A map won’t solve everything, but it will do something immediately valuable: it gives you context based on market conditions and once you have that, strategy gets a lot less theoretical and a lot more useful.