The Unicorn Project Quotes

“Trying to get a Phoenix build going is like playing Legend of Zelda, if it were written by a sadist, forcing her to adventure far and wide to find hidden keys scattered across the kingdom and given only measly clues from uncaring NPCs. But when you finally finish the level, you can’t actually play the next level—you have to mail paper coupons to the manufacturer and wait weeks to get the activation codes.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“There’s a very real cognitive and spiritual burden of having to carry so many unfulfilled promises forever into the future, where anyone can ask at any time “Where is my feature?”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Technical debt is inherently neither good nor bad—it happens because in our daily work, we are always making trade-off decisions,” he says. “To make the date, sometimes we take shortcuts, or skip writing our automated tests, or hard-code something for a very specific case, knowing that it won’t work in the long-term. Sometimes we tolerate daily workarounds, like manually creating an environment or manually performing a deployment. We make a grave mistake when we don’t realize how much this impacts our future productivity.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Now that I think about it, I once had a debate with him about how completely you should or shouldn’t isolate the cardholder data environment in order to comply with the PCI Data Security Standard.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a ‘sfdeljknesv.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“She wonders what is happening: Too many promises to the market? Bad engineering leadership? Bad product leadership? Too much technical debt? Not enough focus on architectures and platforms that enable developers to be productive?”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Good morning, and I’d like to just answer the question that you’re probably thinking. The answer is, yes, we’re the team that built the current mobile apps—both of them. We’re not proud, and we’re just glad users can’t rate an app with zero stars.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“But in reality, when developers work, they’re usually staring at the screen, deep in concentration, trying to understand what the code does so they can safely and surgically change it without breaking something else as an unintended side-effect, especially if they’re working on something mission-critical”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“There were other surprises, as well. They used a technique called Wardley Maps to better localize what parts of various value chains were commodities and should be outsourced, which should be purchased, and which should be kept in-house because they created durable, competitive advantage. They used this exercise to methodically disposition their technology stacks, given the business context.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“the part about the product manager not showing up for the demo pisses her off. What a disrespectful thing to do to engineers who built what you asked them to.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Great QA requires a perverse and sometimes sadistic intuition for what will cause software to blow up, crash, or endlessly hang. Maxine once heard a joke: “A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a ‘sfdeljknesv.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“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”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“We all know the threat the company faces is real, she thinks. 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.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project

“Are we playing to win and to establish the technical supremacy we need to keep up with what the business needs, or do we just keep limping along, shackled to things built decades ago, and tell our business leadership to throw in the towel and stop having good ideas?”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“If there’s any time that deserves courage and relentless optimism, it’s now,”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“technical debt’ is what creates hardship, toil, and reduces the agility of our software engineers,”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“our competition is not the FAANGs—it’s the other horses in our industry and tiny little software startups that are encroaching on our market.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“we typically segment the customer base, so we know what set of problems each faces.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“And if we can’t experiment, we can’t learn!”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“If only we had a single view of the customer: top of funnel, bottom of funnel, as well as their complete history with the company. Not only what they purchased, but also what they did on our site, what they browsed, searched for, their credit card transactions, repair history … There’s so much potential!”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“everyone has learned something about how Data Hub actually works, in stark contrast with their mental models of how they thought it works.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Reflecting on the meeting, Maxine now appreciates how 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 … Given all this, it’s amazing that psychological safety can be created at all, she thinks.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Early in her career, the ratio of UX and designers to developers was 1:70. These days, great teams doing consumer-oriented products have ratios of 1:6 because it’s that important to create products that people love.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“These days, great teams doing consumer-oriented products have ratios of 1:6 because it’s that important to create products that people love.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“now some of the best engineers in the company are working on making everyone else more productive. That’s the way it should be, she thinks.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Bash is the disease you die with, but don’t die of.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“The goal is clear: enable fast and safe deployments into production, and for the first time in years, do it using the same environments across Dev, Test, and Production.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

“Maxine remembers what it felt like to be the patient advocate for her dad, doing whatever it took to get him through the healthcare system. Now, she recommits herself to doing whatever it takes to get her teams through the company bureaucracies—the Data Hub team’s sense of mission and urgency deserve no less. Relentless optimism, she reminds herself.”
― Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data