Mapping the unknown – Steps to map any industry | Hacker News Reader

Mapping the unknown – Steps to map any industry

steveblank.com

127 pointssblank15 comments

Sounds a little like the first stages of Wardley mapping https://learnwardleymapping.com/ (and arguable that these are not maps, just graphs)

+1 Thanks for the link to Wardley Mapping! I'd never heard of it and it looks really compelling. Stoked! :)

The author talks about building a diagram of the relations in an industry. Any sufficiently complex industry (or any system, really) has so many different kinds of relations that they can't be expressed in a single diagram without making a mess. What he should be doing is breaking up these relations across multiple perspectives: https://www.ilograph.com/blog/posts/multiperspective-diagram...

For those wondering what this is about:

> Drawing a diagram of the relationships of companies in an industry can help you deeply understand how the industry works and who the key players are. Start building one immediately. As you find you can’t fill in all the relationships, the gaps outlining what you need to learn will become immediately visible.

Nice strategy. I’m eager to try this out.

Would anyone care to recommend a piece of software that will allow me to build maps showing relationships? Something akin to a mindmap with nodes and a web of interconnections. I’d like to build a map of businesses and relationships in my industry. Something I can add to over many years.

It's what mathematicians[0] and programmers[1] refers to as a graph. Traditionally you would use http://graphviz.org/ and its many derivatives, which meets your long-term-stable criteria. These days if you want clicky web GUI you can use a bunch of javascript-ports, eg. https://sketchviz.com/new or https://github.com/jwilber/roughViz ... avoid valuing presentation over content, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type)

And if you're more into scripting, TikZ:

https://tikz.dev/library-mindmaps

A cool notes app that does this is https://obsidian.md/

This is exactly TheBrain’s use case: TheBrain.com

If you want something long-lived, and want to diagram all of the relations from multiple views: https://www.ilograph.com/

Obsidian.md and its integration with Excalidraw (and especially ExcaliBrain) are exactly this.

I think Logseq is really what you need. Knowledge graph + outliner. It's local, exportable, zero-friction and a joy to use.

https://logseq.com

This would have really helped me at one of my previous jobs! Thanks for sharing!

Sounds like this will work on understanding any complex system.. like a code base or production system. Very cool, will try it.

This is great and would have saved me so much anxiety in the past.

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