The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

by Gene Kim

In the ideal, they should have just assigned a team that included developers to explore the idea and build a solution together. Instead of one product manager working on this the entire time, we could have had five people working on it. And we could have been learning the whole time,

Maggie comes up with an elegant solution. She decides to move the Data Hub product manager from the Marketing building to a desk right by Maxine starting Monday.

product owner moved his desk right next to Maxine. The dynamic immediately shifts. To get answers, things no longer wait on tickets. Engineers are able to just swivel their chairs around and ask him. Things that normally took days are being resolved in minutes. And better yet, engineers start gaining a much better understanding of the business domain.

reality is much, much messier. It was the “world as imagined” colliding violently with the “world as it actually is.”

It was messy and imperfect, but the fact that they were quickly solving these problems gave Maxine confidence that they were on the right track.

“Every time we have an outage, we’ll be conducting a blameless post-mortem like this one. The spirit and intent of these sessions are to learn from them, chronicling what happened before memories fade. Prevention requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear.

Norm Kerth says in the Agile Prime Directive, ‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’

tenuous and fleeting the conditions that enable psychological safety can be. It depends on the behavior of leaders, one’s peers, their moods, their sense of self-worth, wounds from their pasts

if we can’t experiment, we can’t learn!”

Famously at Parts Unlimited, every leader at the director-level or higher must work in the stores as a front-line employee twice a year.

“In order to speak clearly, you need to be able to think clearly. And to think clearly, you usually need to be able to write it clearly.”

FAANGs that Erik talked about—the Facebooks, Amazons, Apples, Netflixes, and Googles of the world.

This is not a story about small beating large; it’s fast beats slow.

Tuckman phases of teams, going through form, storm, norm, and perform.

team names help create an identity for the entire group, not just for individuals, and they reinforce the notion that team goals are more important than individual goals.

The most difficult part was not the mechanics of importing the data from twenty different business systems. Instead, it was trying to create a unified vocabulary and taxonomy that they could use, because almost every business system had different names for similar things.

Maxine is a little alarmed to learn that they’re still deciding which one percent of the customer base they’re targeting—but if they aren’t panicking, she won’t panic either. They’ve earned that level of trust over the last several weeks.

When everyone knows what the goals are, as Erik predicted, teams will self-organize to best achieve those goals.

They realize that they are on a journey of learning and exploration, and that making mistakes is inevitable. Creating ever-safer systems and continual improvement is now viewed as part of daily work.

Left to their own devices, development teams will often optimize everything around themselves. This is just the parochial and selfish nature of individual teams. And that’s why you need architects,

We developers are great at what we do, but these types of crises are a part of everyday life for Ops.

“Thundering herd problem,” Wes mutters, referring to when simultaneous client retries end up killing a server.

“She thinks we pay developers just to type, instead of paying them to think and achieve business outcomes. And that means we pay them to learn, because that’s how we win.

the only way they could have achieved what they had was by creating a culture where people felt safe to experiment, to learn and make mistakes, and where people make time for discovery, innovation, and learning.

for something this mission-critical, there’s no way we should depend on external services, she thinks. We need to gracefully handle the case when they’re down or when they cut us off.

the future requires creating a dynamic, learning organization where experimentation and learning are a part of everyone’s daily work.

Net Promoter Score to rate customer satisfaction. We ask our customers, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely it is that they would recommend our stores to their friends. The 9s and 10s are promoters, the 7s and 8s are neutrals, and the rest are detractors. To compute the score, we subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. An NPS score of thirty is considered good, and above fifty is great.

“It’s been true for hundreds of years and probably thousands more: employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that matter. If we do that right, and manage cash effectively, every other financial target will take care of itself.”

“For every winning idea, there are many losing ideas. And some of the winners seemed outright crazy and never would have been approved by the typical middle-manager or committee. The literature suggests that in general, only one out of every three strategic ideas has a positive result, and only a third actually move the needle in a material way.

“For feature promotions, A/B tests, or algorithmic testing, you may be thrilled to even have five percent of tests work.

“The concepts of Horizons 1, 2, and 3 were popularized by Sensei Dr. Geoffrey Moore, who is most famous for his book Crossing the Chasm, which introduced the customer adoption curve into modern business planning. He observed that customer adoption is a Gaussian distribution curve, naming them the innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

“Horizon 1 is your successful, cash-cow businesses, where the customer, business, and operational models are well-known and predictable.

Horizon 2 lines of business are so important, because they represent the future of the company. They may introduce the company’s capabilities to new customers, adjacent markets, or with different business models. These endeavors may not be profitable, but this is where we find higher-growth areas.

Horizon 3, where the focus is on velocity of learning and having a broad pool of ideas to explore,” he says. “Here, the name of the game is to prototype ideas

three questions of market risk, technical risk, and business model risk: Does the idea solve a real customer need? Is it technically feasible? And is there a financially feasible engine of growth?

“Horizon 1 thrives on process and consistency, on rules and compliance, and on bureaucracies, which create extraordinary resilience.

in Horizon 3, you must go fast, you must be constantly experimenting, and you must be allowed to break all the rules and processes governing Horizon 1,”

Dr. Steven Spear observed that for each day you can get to market faster, you can often capture upwards of millions of dollars of additional revenue. If you’re first to market, you will capture fifty percent of the revenue that the entire product category will ever yield. Second place will capture twenty-five percent, and third place will get fifteen percent.

“Left unchecked, Horizon 1 leaders will consume all the resources of the company. They will note correctly that they are the lifeblood of the company, but that’s only true in the short term.

“What if psychological safety is as much of a precondition to dynamic, learning organizations as physical safety?”

Hoare principle: “There are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.”

“I’m guessing that all of us believe that our most important work today is finding a way to fund the Innovation effort. Otherwise, everything you’ve done and achieved will go to waste. We’ll just be choosing a slightly slower death.

just by cutting costs. You squeeze every bit of margin you can out of the operation. Some companies thrive at this, and some manage to malinger for decades, but most eventually fade and disappear,”

if you’re not growing, you’re slowly dying.

“Cores are the central competencies of the organization. These are things that customers are willing to pay for and what investors reward,” he says. “Context is everything else. It’s the cafeterias, shuttles between buildings, and the thousands of things companies must do to operate. They’re often mission-critical, such as HR, payroll, and email.

Moore asks, of the applications and services that you manage, which of them are customers willing to pay you for? Which ones truly enhance competitive advantage? And which can you rely on vendors for?

Clay Christiansen once stated, one keeps what is ‘not good enough’ and outsources what is ‘more than good enough,’”

simplicity enables effectiveness, and that complexity conspires against it.

We all have this ideal of small teams working independently, but who manages the teams of teams? It’s your middle managers. Some call them derisively the ‘frozen middle,’ but you’ll find that properly developing this layer of people is critical to execute strategy.

we should find a commercially supported SaaS vendor and get our best people working on things that we can’t find commercial vendors