20+ lessons learned from “The Unicorn Project” by Gene Kim- Part-1
Storyline of a novel about developers, digital disruption and thriving in the era of data.
Last year (2018) I spent some time reading “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim, the book which will make you think about the things that come across your way if you run a tight ship in your organization, devops and typical project teams.
You can read about my thoughts for the book here
This year I got a chance to read “The Unicorn Project” by Gene Kim before the official launch and I went nuts!! 😁
Really thankful to IT Revolution for sharing me a free copy 🤗
Storyline
The Unicorn Project is a whole new plot, it is about “Maxine Chambers” (the developer lead losing her mind as she is forced to stay away from doing “anything”) who will run the ship this time, big surprises along the way, exposure to not only technicalities but also the customer facing problems too, a lot of layoffs & a crazy bartender who knows stuff better then you do!
It is pretty amazing how Maxine was able to link the dots along the way, she motivated her team, changed the way the team was working, made the deployments to move faster, solved problems in the offline stores, created better experiences for the store teams and innovated products for running the grand marketing plans.
It will keep you gripped on every page, the stress, fire fighting, broken things, buggy code, firing of people, sarcasm, empathy is coming along your way.
Both the books “The Phoenix Project” & “The Unicorn Project” are running the plots in parallel, there will be characters in this book that you will recognize from the Phoenix Project but it is not mandatory that you need to read The Phoenix Project before you read The Unicorn Project as both have separate story lines and are not interconnected at all.
20+ Lessons learned from “The Unicorn Project”
- The cycle of corporate grieving
Maxine Chambers will help you understand her movement from the one stage of grieving to the other with no specific order at all. She mentions about the Kuber Ross model of grieving. This is what we go through everyday of our work and we might just relate it to our “bad mood” but actually it is about your mental thoughts transformation in a cycle.
2. Mistakes and entropy are fact of life
With more and more firing of the employees, the book will consistently make you feel how punishing the failure and shooting the messenger can only cause people to hide their mistakes and eventually all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.
3. Missing documentation & scattered information
Maxine joins a project where she is struggling real hard to collect all the information about the configurations, whatever information she has in hand is either outdated or not working and she just spent days sitting ideal as she is unable to setup a test environment for herself.
4. Developers must not work in the isolation.
The book focuses on a scene where a 100 of developers are typing on their laptops without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration and test system, and hence they have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else.
5. Sometimes your checklist just doesn’t work.
Maxine makes a checklist for herself to collect the information she needs to complete the setup on her end, its crazy how her checklist changes from “get account for integration test environments” to “find someone who can give me access to Dev or test environments”. A person who is super productive and doesn’t like to waste any minute of their daily working hours will definitely find this as a frustrating experience.
6. Less or no importance to dev environments will definitely lead to blunders.
The team focuses on features as they can see them into action on web, app or in the API but no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration and test process.
7. Shhhh no one knows the effect, no one knows the cause.
As there is no centralized build, the link between the cause and the effect will disappear with no trace and that’s never a way to run a project.
Continue reading in Part-2
Like what you read? Oh! I deserve a clap then.
