Sat down Sunday and Wardley-mapped my own service stack. Every service I currently sell, every component I currently bundle, every adjacent capability I have considered adding. The full inventory plotted on the genesis-to-commodity axis.
The exercise is uncomfortable to do honestly because it forces you to admit that some of what you sell is no longer rare.
What surprised me, embarrassingly, is how far right several services landed.
Setting up HubSpot is in commodity. The configuration is well-documented, the patterns are stable, a contractor with two years of experience can execute the work. Selling it as a premium service in 2026 is selling a commodity at a premium price, and the only reason that has worked for me is that my buyers do not yet know it is a commodity.
Voice-of-customer audits, on the other hand, sit much further left than I had been treating them. The pattern of mining customer language, building a Lexicon of Pain, surfacing the buyer's job-to-be-done is something most agencies do not know how to do at all. I had been pricing this like a standard discovery and discounting the rarity of the skill.
Three implications.
First, the services that sit in commodity should be either dropped from the stack or repackaged as productized offerings with self-serve fulfillment. There is no reason for me, billing at senior-consultant rates, to be running an implementation contractor could run.
Second, the services that sit in custom or product should be the ones I market as differentiators. The framing is not that I am cheaper than the alternative. The framing is that the alternative does not exist.
Third, the services in genesis, the things I am still figuring out, should be priced as research engagements rather than as productized services. The buyer is paying for the discovery, not the delivery.
The map is doing the work of the Velvet Rope at a different layer. The Velvet Rope filters the buyer. The Wardley map filters the offer. Both are saying the same thing in different vocabularies. Sell what you are uniquely positioned to deliver. Refuse to sell what anyone could deliver.
I will publish the redacted version of the map next month. The redaction is necessary because some of the components are client-specific and the clients have not consented to publication. The shape will be visible even with redaction.