Book Summary: The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim | The Big Ideas and Best Quotes
- Toby Sinclair
- Mar 7, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 3, 2021
⭐ Toby's Rating: 7/10 - Recommended For: Coaches
3 Big Ideas
The Unicorn Project Summary
Five Ideals: Locality and Simplicity; Focus, Flow and Joy; Improvement of Daily Work; Psychological Safety; and Customer Focus.
Create a “Rebel Alliance” – A group of passionate change agents with a clear purpose. This emphasises John Kotter Change Management approach – Build a guiding Coalition
Don’t put your best developers in feature development. Put them on developer productivity such as environments, build tools, test automation. This is what great tech companies do.
2 Unicorn Project Quotes
Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier
Microsoft, still has a culture that if a developer ever has a choice between working on a feature or developer productivity, they should always choose developer productivity.
Tobys Top Takeaway
Here is my top takeaway from The Unicorn Project:
Focus on building a stronger “Rebel Alliance” to create organisational change
Big Ideas Expanded
The Unicorn Project Summary expanded
Dependencies and Approvals significantly impact flow
Don’t outcast project management group. Take them on the journey with you. The project manager in this story was one of the biggest advocates
In the book, there is a strong connection to the State of DevOps survey Most of the drivers described in the survey are highlighted in the book
Employees are often unaware of why existing policies, rules and procedures yet they continue to be blindly followed. This is often the case when safety is low and people are fearful of change.
Factors that reinforce the status quo:
Fear
Lack of clarity around goals
High WIP/Busyness
Leaders are difficult to get hold of
Focus on delivery, not improvement
Lack of autonomy
Low transparency
Senior Management holds all the crucial information – It is not local to the teams
Most organisations and implicitly designed to maintain the status quo and existing power balances
Focus on finding where the constraint is (TOC) As you improve the system the constraint will move from DEV > QA> OPS > Product > Business – The ideal scenario for most tech companies is where tech no longer becomes the bottleneck. Find bottlenecks.
A good ratio of UX developers is 1:6 regular developers. UX is a specialist skill. Most companies have 1:70 ratio
Change Management ethos in The Unicorn Project book:
Build a coalition (Rebel Alliance)
Find Quick Wins
Celebrate Success
Deliver value/Solve real problems
Partnership across boundaries
Brave Leadership – Leaders are willing to lose their jobs for the right thing
The social aspect of teams are amplified – Get to know your colleagues. A lot of the best ideas happened around informal gatherings in bars and hangouts
Tendency to hire people – If this does not resolve the bottleneck it often makes things worse
Prime Directive (Norm Kerth)
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
Functional Programming principles emphasised throughout:
Immutability
Disciplined state
Pure functions and no side effects/disciplined states
First class functions and high order functions
Type systems
Referential transparency
Organisations should expect failure and put in adaptive processes to respond quickly to those failures and LEARN!
Only 1/3 of strategic ideas have positive results
< 5% of A/B Tests give a positive result
Increase the rate of learning to increase the rate of success
Geoffrey Moore Three Horizons
A lot of companies only focus on Horizon 1. In the book, the breakthrough came from an increasing focus on horizon 3.
Horizon 3 work requires rapid learning, experimentation. Perfect for adaptive ways of working
Introduce an innovation process to gather ideas from your company.
Horizon 1 and horizon 3 require different kinds of leaders!!
Horizon one is the core business, stable, predictable, and bureaucratic. Horizon two are smaller businesses that generate new customers, new capabilities and new markets. Horizons three businesses are the highly innovative organisations that explore brand new, disruptive and risky ideas.
Geoffrey Moore Four Zones
Your internal development tools should be seen as products and managed like products
Developers are the customer
Use discovery techniques to understand what the customer(developers) want
Focus on GROWTH, not cost-cutting. Growth is more sustainable and promotes better, long term thinking.
Don’t manage dependencies, eliminate them!!
Geoffrey Moore – Core v Context
Reduce focus on context – Increase focus on Core business
Outsource “context” otherwise, it will cause distraction and lack of focus. Many companies incorrectly outsource their core business, often leading to very bad results – for example, outsource IT even though IT now is a core part of almost every business
Engage your employees within the change journey – Ask: What is the biggest blocker to Adaptability? Fund solutions to these problems
CAUTION: When you shake the system it will push back, sometimes with big consequences – In the book, a key change agent loses their jobs as senior management to not welcome the disruption to the status quo.
Three Types of culture explore in the book:
The changes discussed in the book allow you to move from a power orientated culture to a performance related one.
