Five Ideals in The Unicorn Project

If you ask me what I did this Sunday, my answer is starting and finishing reading the upcoming new book “The Unicorn Project”, authored by Gene Kim which is about to release on 26 Nov, 2019. Thank you to Gene and Ally from IT Revolution for sharing the advance copy, loved the book! If you’re in any Digital business, I would strongly recommend you to read this.

The Phoenix Project has been a must-read book if you want to know about DevOps; The Unicorn project in my view is about how to create the story of “fast beats slow” as part of digital transformation effort of the company - Parts Unlimited. Unlike many other books, this book is coming from real life war stories, pretty sure you will be able to relate to many stories (functional silos, tickets, merge pains, environment, testing, release and many more), with tears or with laugh.

As a female technologist, I’m excited to see female leaders like Maxine, Maggie, Sarah in different roles and in different positions, much more diversity view and they’re making their marks!

Five deals is the key theme that drives the transformation and acting as the principle for both leadership and team. This is not top-down, not bottom-up, the magic only works with leadership and team working as one team, sharing the vision.

First ideal of locality and Simplicity: design things so that we have locality in our systems and organizations that build them; need simplicity in everything that we do.
The second ideal is Focus, Flow and Joy.
The third ideal is the improvement of Daily Work. 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.
The fifty ideal is customer focus - we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they willing to pay us for it or only value to our functional silo

The introduction of “Complexity Debt”, as “Technical Debt” is no longer enough to describe the impact to business.

I will leave the rest for you to enjoy :)