20+ lessons learned from “The Unicorn Project” by Gene Kim- Part-2

Storyline of a novel about developers, digital disruption and thriving in the era of data.

This blog is in continuation to Part-1 of my learning from “ The Unicorn Project”

20+ pointers I wrote down in my diary and are taken from this book

8. Centralized integration helps developers to remain consistent.

One of the really nice things about running your program frequently is that you get to see it running, which is fun & that’s what programming is all about.

9. Each developer on team should be able to be productive.

When you work in a team, as a part of project management, it is your primary responsibility to ensure that any contributor can be productive. Each member of the project has access to the information that they require to work independently or may be with less dependency and also they are able to execute their codes independently.

10. Scattered information & hierarchy kills time.

In the book, there is a situation where Maxine is trying to get access to all the information she needs to run the code by herself. You will find her going up 2 levels, over 2 levels and down 2 levels just to talk with a fellow engineer as for each and every thing she has to raise a ticket. She doesn’t want to depend on people and keep waiting for the ticket to resolve or just wait to find that the ticket got closed for no reason.

11. Big projects, personal incentives & no cross checks?

The book also focuses on the teams or sub-groups which only care about growing the union & the project budget but not about what’s right for the business.

12. First Ideal: Simplicity & Locality

Simplicity is important because it enables locality. Locality in code is what keeps systems loosely coupled, enabling teams to deliver features faster.

13. Complexity debt vs new features

You can choose to build new features or pay down complexity debt. When a fool spends all their time on features, the inevitable outcome is that even easy tasks become difficult and take longer to execute. And no matter how hard you try or how many people you have, it eventually collapses under its own weight forcing you to start over from scratch.

14. Second Ideal: Focus, flow & joy

A good product describes how it was built. Great ideas are generated by people who are focused towards what they do or build and infact enjoy building it. If a team enjoys building something then it turns out to be a stable and wonderful product as compared to teams where people are working in silos and are less involved mentally.

15. Third Ideal: Improvement of daily work

Every human’s goal should be to “improvise” in whatever they do, gradually as they spend more days doing it. For every repetitive work, we should work on improving the quality and try to innovate it so that we are also not feeling it monotonous to perform every day.

16. Fourth Ideal: Psychological safety

Whenever we work in groups or teams, we should ensure psychological safety, which means we make it safe for people to talk about problems. Because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty and honesty requires the absence of fear. Psychological safety will always help to improve the quality of work everybody is doing and their contribution to the project. Not only this, it will also bring empathy within your team where each member can understand the problems everybody else is going through.

17. Fifth Ideal: Customer focus

Development teams are always kept away from customer focus, as they are only given the details or requirements which are needed to understand a feature but not the information about the impact. While its important to keep team focused only on the scope for which they are responsible, a summary of customer impact should also be added to their requirements so that they can relate what impact this feature will produce once it is released.

Customer focus: where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, if they are willing to pay us for it or is it only of value to our functional silos.

Continue reading Part-3

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