Audiobook Review: The Unicorn Project
The Unicorn Project is Gene Kim’s follow up to 2013’s The Phoenix Project, which I reviewed a couple of years ago.
I’ve re-read the original a few times since my original review, and it’s given me a little something new every time. Now that my job is much more “DevOps-y” than it was in 2018, I was very excited to read a sequel. For the most part, it didn’t disappoint, and I might even have gotten more out of this book than the original!
The Story
The Unicorn Project takes place in parallel to the Phoenix Project, during the same period of transformation at Parts Unlimited. A disclaimer early on indicates that some aspects of the story have been altered to take account of changes in the industry and daily life in the intervening 6 years (the rise of Uber and Lyft, new DevOps tooling, etc). However, this by itself was not as jarring as it might have been.
The story follows Maxine, a developer who is exiled to the Phoenix Project as a direct result of the payroll outage that begins both books. She quickly sets to work trying to get a build of Phoenix working, but quickly discovers mountains of bureaucracy and technical complexity standing in her way, and indeed every developer on the project. She joins with like minded developers to lead a charge to make the experience from test to deployment faster and easier for all, applying a number of best practices, and learning along the way.
The book stays mostly separate from The Phoenix Project, with few, if any scenes in common. This keeps the book fresh and interesting, and serves to demonstrate that it wasn’t Bill’s (the original protagonist) efforts alone that transformed the company. This does take a little bit of the jeopardy away from the original, but also highlights that transformation cannot come from one person alone.
The only aspect of the shared timeline I wasn’t entirely sold on were a few touches that seemed more like “fan service”. The sage-like board member dispensing advice in the first novel is introduced in a way that feels very forced, when there could have been many opportunities to do this more naturally.
Similar to the first book, the epilogue seems a little self congratulatory, although with more emphasis on the contributions of the whole team, which served nicely to tone things down.
Despite these issues, I found it to be a gripping listen and I was eager to get out for my daily run so I could find out what happens next. It’s not often that an audiobook will take up my attention to such a degree!
Lessons
A lot of the issues raised in the book are things that my current workplace does very well. We deploy many times a day, and our teams are reasonably autonomous, avoiding a lot of handoff when trying to get things done.
But in every big problem presented in The Unicorn Project, I was often seeing a little problem or the potential for one in how we do things.
Much of The Unicorn Project is devoted to establishing the Five Ideals, similarly to the Three ways from the first book. This ideals represent a series of problems that businesses need to solve to produce an innovative, culture where learning and rapid improvement are the norm. In addition to these ideals, the book also addresses concepts such as McKinsey’s Horizons of Growth and Core vs Context activities.
In addition to these concepts, a number of learnings are prevalent in the course of the story, such as:
- Red tape is frustrating on all sides, and empathy will get you a long way.
- The more teams are involved in accomplishing single task, the slower it will go.
- Working your team as hard as possible will only reduce your capacity later.
Where to Get It
Published by IT Revolution Press, The Unicorn Project is available on Audible, Amazon and all other major e-book sources. A full list is available on the official page.
