Pioneers - Settlers - Town Planners
Pioneers - Settlers - Town Planners (PST) is an organizational model for aligning teams based on the maturity of the product or service they provide, instead of the usual organizational division by business units (such as finance, marketing, IT). Pioneers invent, Settlers turn inventions into products, Town Planners turn products into utilities for Pioneers.
Contrasting PST to one-size-fits-all organizations, Simon Wardley suggests that different teams, staffed by people with different skills and attitudes, are better suited to products on a different evolutionary level from genesis to commodity. Even within a single organization such teams can work with different operating models and “should be given autonomy in their space”, which can be achieved by “the team providing well defined interfaces for others to consume along with defined boundaries often described through some form of fitness function”. Products in genesis require experimentation and variations. Taking them to market requires stability and performance. Commodity products require focus on volume operations and removing variance and deviations. To resolve such differences, Wardley suggests that IT, finance, marketing and all other aspects of the business need to be aligned with the evolutionary stage of component or product being built, closely reflecting Geoffrey Moore’s suggestions from the Three Horizons Model.
- Pioneers are able to explore novel concepts, usually performing research or building half-baked products that demonstrate a concept. They are expected to fail a lot, create “crazy ideas” and work autonomously with very small teams covering lots of different aspects. Generally their work, and the output of their work, does not scale. They “make future success possible”, by working on items that have a high potential future value in emerging market segments.
- Settlers can turn prototypes into products, build customer trust and understanding, and “turn the half-baked thing into something useful for a larger audience”. They “make the possible future actually happen”, by working on items that have high profitability in growing market segments.
- Town Planners take an existing product and turn it into a utility. They optimize products and enable them to take advantages of economies of scale. Ultimately, they “create the components that pioneers build upon” by producing standardised, stable high volume products in mature markets.
Wardley suggests that when staffing different teams, it’s critical to look both for aptitude and for attitude. Someone comfortable working as a pioneer would not fit well into a situation requiring town planners, and the other way around.
The three groups of teams build upon each others work. Town planners turn differentiating products into utility components, pioneers can then use those components to iterate quickly and build higher-order novel systems. Settlers identify patterns from custom-built products and turn them into reusable libraries and components. As the libraries of components evolve, Town Planners can consolidate them and start a new cycle of utilities.
Pioneers build and operate the novel. Pioneers are responsible for their pioneering and that means everything. They tend to do this by consuming components built by Settlers (e.g. product or libraries) and Town Planners (e.g. industrialised services). Town planners on the other hand build and operate the industrialised components of huge scale. Don’t fall into the trap that Pioneers build new stuff and hand it off to someone else to run or operate. That’s not how this works.
- Simon Warley, Doctrine
The Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners metaphor was proposed by Simon Wardley in 2012. In the Doctrine chapter of the digital book on Wardley Maps, Simon Wardley credits the inspiration for the idea to Robert X. Cringely’s book Accidental Empires, using a similar metaphor of Commandos, Infantry and Police.
Learn more about Pioneers - Settlers - Town Planners
- Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners by Simon Wardley (2012)
- Doctrine by Simon Wardley (2016)
- Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, ISBN 978-0887308550, by Robert X. Cringely (1996)