The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim

This needs to be prefaced by I’ve already read the previous book in the series “The Phoenix Project”. I think the fact that I have, has detracted from the transformative undertaking displayed in the book, as it follows the same timeline in the same environment that The Phoenix Project sets out, just different players in the same company.

That said, it’s still a good read. While The Phoenix Project was more focused from an admin/ops side of things, this book is concentrating on the developer side of things.

The environment set out is an example definitely taken from the extreme end of the scale, and shows how through using modern devops principles (mainly focusing on CI/CD), that the development process speeds up, and requires much less labour, basically governing itself.

For our current experience, I think the book does hit the mark a bit, as the cloud use taken up as they explore CI/CD, is only very lightly spoken on.

Quite a bit of the book discusses how they’re subverting the norm by thieving unused hardware or spending time working on projects their managers don’t know about that they believe will assist in increasing engineer productivity by automating away processes.

I do think that the main things people should focus on in the book is the words of wisdom provided by the character Erik, which was the guru in the previous book aswell.

The main ways he gets the developers looking at the wider company rather than looking basically at their feet the whole time and only concentrating on what’s in front of them is by bestowing them with 5 ideals.

1. Locality & Simplicity: Basically implementing the Keep It Simple Stupid principle. Remove unneeded complexity to ensure things are easy to troubleshoot later, Locality is trying to reduce the scope of any body of work down to it’s essential minimum.
2. Focus, Flow & Joy: Ensure you enable the engineers to do what they need to, and get out of their way so they can focus on the work. Ensure you’re giving them small tasks with frequent feedback so they know if they’re on track. Make sure it’s work they can enjoy. I’ve definitely experienced the situation Maxine goes through, where they do the hard work, and then due to beuraucracy you don’t get to see the outcome of the work you’re doing.
3. Improvement of daily work: It’s just about everyone striving to improve processes constantly & building processes to enable that. Whether it’s adding information to a Wiki so that people after you can do it quicker/better, or automating a task you can see can be, or just creating processes to streamline things to reduce needless red tape.
4. Psychological Safety: Create an environment where everyone feels safe giving feedback. Discerning where to assign blame ultimately doesn’t fix the issue at hand, or create processes around ensuring the same issue doesn’t occur in future. Focus on post mortem’s where everyone can give candid constructive feedback. Without Psychological safety, employees will hide issues, withhold feedback & duck and cover whenever anything goes bad. With Psychological safety, issues will be raised as soon as they’re noticed, feedback provided about anything people notice, and employees will run toward the problem to be part of the solution instead of being concerned they’ll get fired for being near it.
5. Customer Focus: Whereas we’re used to channeling Amazon’s customer obsession leadership princile, The Unicorn Project discusses it from a business point of view. The organisation exists to serve its customers, not the other way around. They split parts of the business into two categories. Core, which is what customers are willing & able to pay for (e.g. the products you sell, services you offer). Context, which is what is required to deliver those Core systems. They could be accounting, helpdesk, timesheeting to name a few. These are the ones that while essential to the business, you should consider whether outsourcing can do it better. I liken it to how AWS sells their PaaS & SaaS offerings by telling companies that they can pay a bit extra, use those services, and focus on what’s actually making them money instead.

Overall I think the book’s a good read, just a bit anti-climactic for me considering that I’ve read the previous book, so the ending’s already spoiled. The roads they travel down to get there though are no less entertaining. It was good having the moments of recognition “Oh I remember that person!”. I would like to have an opinion of the book from someone who’s not read The Phoenix Project previously to see what they thought.