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

by Gene Kim

moved from denial to anger and is now in full-blown bargaining mode.

Kübler-Ross grief cycle,

Don’t rock the boat.

stay off Steve and Dick’s radar.

mistakes and entropy are a fact of life.

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

the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality code quickly and safely, freeing themselves from all the things that prevent them from solving important business problems.

scheduling meetings with people to get things she needs, trapped in the worst scavenger hunt ever.

She doesn’t want to see brochures for the car they’ve promised to build—she wants to see the engineering plans and the actual parts that they’re going to assemble the car

Need both.

Always good to give more than you get—you never know who can help you in the future. Networking matters.

the three metrics I care most about: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow.

When our company’s stock price goes down while our competitors’ shares are going up, something has to change.

companies have two modes of operations: peacetime and wartime. Peacetime is when things are going well. This is when we are growing as a company and can continue business as usual.

so there’s hope. But hope alone is not a strategy,

intelligent, aggressive, and ambitious.

Kirsten, with the earnestness that makes her so effective, doesn’t let it go. She leans forward. “No, really. I think you said, ‘Good luck, chumps.’ I’m always interested in your perspective, given your extensive success in plant operations. I’d love to better understand what made you laugh.”

Bill quickly responds. “If we’re the bottleneck, I need to know. Let’s figure out how to get William what he needs.”

They’re in such deep trouble that they’re all covering their asses and throwing each other under the bus.

Five hours later she’s in a terrible mood—exhausted, frustrated, irritated, and absolutely positive that she has just wasted an entire day going down rabbit holes she never should have gone down. Basically,

know immediately to avoid her. She is wearing her “Mom is in a super bad mood” face.

She refuses to feel powerless, at the mercy of distant powers, trapped inside a cold bureaucracy actively impeding her goals, aspirations, desires, and needs.

using the right keywords to get the two supervisors from both companies on the phone to line up all the necessary work.

She ignores all the team status updates, except for the ones where people are yelling at each other in ALL CAPS.

She wants to know who the hotheads are so she can avoid them.

We’re all part of Parts Unlimited, so why does everything feel like I’m dealing with a government bureaucracy or an uncaring vendor? Maxine ponders. Maybe it’s because when friends do favors for friends, we don’t require them to open a ticket first.

whatever language you’re using, the most important thing is to run your program all the time,” she says. “When I’m doing something for the first time, I run my program every time I change anything, just to make sure it still compiles and runs. That way, I don’t make the same mistake for hours without knowing. Better to catch the mistake the first time you make it, right?”

when you have customers, change is a fact of life. A healthy software system is one that you can change at the speed you need, where people can contribute easily, without jumping through hoops.

“Stow it, Wes. Work the problem. Stay focused.”

leave me out of this, John. That train has left the station, and you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The only thing we can do is figure out how to keep this rocket from blowing up on the launch pad and killing us all. Pardon the mixed metaphor,”

going down this path is almost certainly the stupidest thing I’ve seen in my entire career … but to support the team, I promise we’ll all do what we can.”

the bridge officers, are so disconnected from the daily work of the “redshirts” in the technology organization.

She has never in her career abdicated all testing and deployment to someone else. How can you create anything of value if you don’t have feedback on how it’s used? she

Everything is by committee. No one can make decisions, and implementing even the smallest thing seems to require consensus from everyone.

“This company is run by a bunch of executives with no clue about technology, and project managers who want us to follow a bunch of arcane processes.

“William is like a union leader, not a business leader,”

if you don’t spend your whole budget, they’ll take the money away from you next year.”

I’ve finally found my tribe,

And I’m even betting that they needed to bring in project managers where they probably didn’t need them before.

“They did it to reduce costs, but surely, in the end, it was more expensive for everyone all around. And I bet it took everyone longer to do their work, with everyone having to communicate, coordinate, get approvals, with project managers shuffling and deconflicting all the work.

teams able to work independently but at the cost of having to maintain three networking switches. “When you put them all on one switch, you complected their value streams, all now having dependencies on each other that didn’t exist before. They must constantly communicate, coordinate, schedule, marshal, sequence, and deconflict their work. They now have an extremely high cost of coordination, which has lengthened lead times, decreased quality, and, in your story, led to a week-long catastrophe

“Locality in our code and organization is so desirable, as opposed to what we have now, which is code scattered everywhere!”

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.

work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work?

Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work.

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.

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 is it only of value to our functional silo?”

The First Ideal—Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal—Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal—Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal—Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal—Customer Focus Maxine

“You and I both know that William was never a big fan of yours. He never spoke very highly of you in meetings. They’re probably going to bring in someone from the outside.”

Manager not support

Kirsten says, “Kurt, I agree with your instincts. If you want, I’ll write a letter of recommendation to Chris.”

Need someone matter to support the promotion