The Unicorn Project

A Novel About Developers, Digital Distruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

Gene Kim

Published: 2019

This books tells the same story as The Phoenix Project but in the eyes of a software developer, instead of the team manager. This change of perspective is very interesting!

ChatGPT's summary

Premise:

While The Phoenix Project focuses on IT operations and leadership (from Bill’s perspective), The Unicorn Project tells a parallel story from the point of view of Maxine, a senior developer at Parts Unlimited. After a production incident, she’s blamed and reassigned to a failing initiative—The Phoenix Project.

Her journey highlights the struggles of developers, data teams, and architects in a dysfunctional organization that’s trying to modernize.

Key Themes and Concepts:

The Five Ideals (Core framework of the book):

1. Locality and Simplicity

2. Empower teams to work independently without needing to coordinate across many departments.

3. Reduce complexity by improving code locality and modularity.

4. Focus, Flow, and Joy

5. Remove friction so developers can focus and achieve flow.

6. Joyful work is productive work.

7. Improvement of Daily Work

8. Teams must have the ability (and time) to improve their own work systems, not just deliver features.

9. Technical debt isn’t just a cost—it’s a barrier to innovation.

10. Psychological Safety

11. Teams must feel safe to take risks, admit mistakes, and speak up.

12. Cultivating trust enables collaboration and learning.

13. Customer Focus

14. Every decision should deliver value to the customer.

15. Avoid internal politics and misguided metrics that distract from this goal.

Plot Highlights:

• Maxine is "exiled" to the Rebellion, an underground group of developers trying to fix systemic IT dysfunction.
• She faces broken toolchains, slow approvals, overly complex systems, and resistance from management.

• Using the Five Ideals, Maxine and the Rebellion begin to transform the company from the inside out, tackling:

• Continuous delivery pipelines

• Infrastructure as code
• Developer autonomy
• Data democratization

Relation to The Phoenix Project:

• Same company (Parts Unlimited), same timeline.
• Different viewpoint—Maxine’s journey complements Bill’s and gives insight into the developer experience.
• It broadens the DevOps conversation to include developer productivity, data science, and software architecture.

Who Should Read It?

• Software engineers, developers, architects
• Technical leaders aiming to build high-performance engineering cultures
• Teams dealing with legacy systems and digital transformation