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

by Gene Kim

Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

Creating software should be a collaborative and conversational endeavor—individuals need to interact with each other to create new knowledge and value for the customer.

Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else’s.

Everyone around here thinks features are important, because they can see them in their app, on the web page, or in the API. But no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.

developers need a system where they can get fast and continual feedback on the quality of their work. If you don’t find problems quickly, you end up finding them months later. By then, the problem is lost in all the other changes that every other developer made, so the link between cause and effect disappears without a trace.

A healthy software system is one that you can change at the speed you need, where people can contribute easily, without jumping through hoops.

The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.

How can you create anything of value if you don’t have feedback on how it’s used?

attention to him. “I’ve already told you about the First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity. We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. And we need simplicity in everything we do.

“The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy. It’s all about how our daily work feels.

The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. Reflect upon what the Toyota Andon cord teaches us about how we must elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself.

The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, where we make it safe to talk about problems, because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear.

the Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they willing to pay us for it or ...

“Technical debt is a fact of life, like deadlines. Business people understand deadlines, but often are completely oblivious that technical debt even exists.

‘a bad system will beat a good person every time.’

what’s the plural of ‘developer’?” says Maxine. “A ‘merge conflict.

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,

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. For any later entrants, it will surely have been a complete waste of time and money.