Book Review | The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim

The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim, Author of the Phoenix Project

I recently completed reading The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim. Gene is the author of the Phoenix Project before.

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The tl;dr?

Read it! It’s worth your time and might change your evil ways. You don’t have evil ways? Are you so sure? If you think you don’t then you should definitely grab a copy and read. There is a little something for everyone involved in any way in building software today and every company is in the business of building software today whether you realize it or not.

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This book was, for me, deeply refreshing. I’ve been immersed in the world of DevOps since its inception. I was a presenter at the world’s first cloud camp in 2008 in San Francisco. After that, I went off to work at Joyent and build the one of the first clouds. Then, I built a Disaster Recovery as a Service cloud that we eventually sold to Acronis called nScaled. In that talk, I argued that cloud computing and the on-demand nature of how it was provisioned would fundamentally change developer practices. The concept of DevOps didn’t quite exist yet. It was the quest to build more resilient distributed systems in particular that led to that. It was the work done at companies like Joyent and Amazon in the earliest days of the world’s largest and most trafficked websites like Twitter and ABC Family Networks. It was the many wonderful articles written and collected at websites like HighScalability.com. It was the work of luminaries in the field like Michael Nygard, Jez Humble, Adrian Cockcroft from Netflix, Marty Abbot of The Art of Scalability, and a great many more that, at least in part, led us to a book like the Unicorn project coming into being.

In particular, one of the most important things about this book is that I can recommend it to business readers. This is a genre sometimes called business novels. These are fictionalized accounts of real-world struggles and experiences. They are designed to deliver wisdom to the readers in a non-textbook-like way. This was popularized by authors like Eliyahu Goldrat in The Goal and Critical Chain.

This book delivers a fun story of the, in my opinion, heroine and hero Maxine and Kurt. Two brave souls with seemingly unlimited patience. I tweeted to the author my wonder at their demonstrated patience.

Gene was awesome as per usual and tweeted back a wise comment about relentlessness in addition to patience.

I truly agree! Relentlessness is 100% required. This is true for any type of deep and persistent organizational change to happen. In a similar fashion to a true entrepreneur, you must not quit. You must invest in a way that can be sustained for a long period of time.

My only criticism in the book is that it all happened so fast in the timeline of the book. It’s possible. But, it’s unlikely that a company such as was Parts Unlimited at the inception of the book would be able to transform so completely and so quickly. But, as I said, it is possible! But, don’t be surprised if this takes a bit longer. And remember, it’s a marathon of marathons with all the incumbent sprints to the finish line followed by the infamous phrase, are we there yet? If you grok the book fully, you’ll know that the answer to that question is always a big fat N-O. No, we are not there yet and we never will be. But, you will revel in this fact and the knowledge that it predicts a glorious future of continuous learning.

One of the most valuable features of this book is the footnotes and resources that will lead you to the publisher’s website and several more sets of tools, links, and more.

Ultimately, this may not be the review you were looking for but if you are planning to attempt a digital transformation (“DX”) then it would behoove you to read this book so you can integrate these critical aspects into that work.

You will learn about DevOps and Continuous Delivery. You will learn about deployment optimization, team building, automation, and source code management. You’ll get a wonderful refresher on the business legend Crossing the Chasm. And, of course, you will eventually find the wonderful resources guide.
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Kent Langley is the principal architect, consultant, and coach at ProductionScale. ProductionScale’s digital transformation (“DX”) programs embody an intense focus on communications, team performance, and individual capability development. This de-risks the transformation process and delivers on the promise of technology-driven transformation to leaders and their teams. Learn more about Kent or contact us at ProductionScale here.