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The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data Kindle Edition
"The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project..."--FERNANDO CORNAGO, Senior Director Platform Engineering, Adidas
"Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how ... the efforts of many create lasting business advantages for all."--DR. STEVEN SPEAR, author of The High-Velocity Edge, Sr. Lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC.
"The Unicorn Project is so clever, so good, so crazy enlightening!"--CORNELIA DAVIS, Vice President Of Technology at Pivotal Software, Inc., Author of Cloud Native Patterns
This highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development.
In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals.
One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies.
The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms--this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity.
"The Unicorn Project provides insanely useful insights on how to improve your technology business."--DOMINICA DEGRANDIS, author of Making Work Visible and Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop
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"My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book can create common ground for technology and business leaders to leave the past behind, and co-create a better future together."--Gene Kim, November 2019
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherIT Revolution Press
- Publication dateNovember 26, 2019
- File size7122 KB
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From the Publisher
Revisit Parts Unlimited
You saw the Ops side in The Phoenix Project. Now take a look at the Dev side.
The Five Ideals
While The Phoenix Project brought you the Three Ways of DevOps, The Unicorn Project reveals the Five Ideals: The First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity; The Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy; The Third Ideal of Improvement of Daily Work; The Fourth Ideal of Psychological Safety; and the Fifth Ideal of Focus on the Customer.
About the author...
Gene Kim is a multi-award winning CTO, researcher, and author. He is the founder of Tripwire and served as CTO for thirteen years. His books include The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, The DevOps Handbook, Beyond the Phoenix Project, Accelerate, The Visible Ops Handbook, and Visible Ops Security. He is also the founder of IT Revolution and the DevOps Enterprise Summits held in London and Las Vegas.
Gene is a huge fan of IT operations and how it can enable developers to maximize throughput of features from “code complete” to “in production” without causing chaos and disruption to the IT environment. He has worked with some of the top Internet companies on improving deployment flow and increasing the rigor around IT operational processes. In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People to Watch Under the Age of 40” list, and he was named a Computer Science Outstanding Alumnus by Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.
IT Revolution: Leading the Charge to the Next Revolution in IT
IT Revolution publishes books that exemplify the most current best practices for IT organizations in the enterprise. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and improve the lives of IT professionals around the world.
Our authors include top industry thought-leaders who, through elevated discourse, inspire positive change for IT practitioners. Founded in 2013 by Gene Kim, IT Revolution serves the DevOps community by publishing numerous books and other publications, producing the DevOps Enterprise Summits in London and San Francisco, and supporting qualitative and quantitative research projects with various partners.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“What are developers' two typical experiences? Frustration, fatigue, anxiety, and aggravation when nothing comes together like it should and projects run late, over budget, and under promise. The Unicorn Project gives an empathetic over-the-shoulder look at how a peer can escape these too familiar circumstances, and Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how a dynamic, discovery-oriented approach to technology transformation can combine the efforts of many to create lasting business advantages for all.” -- Dr. Steven Spear, author of The High-Velocity Edge, Sr. Lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC.
“The Unicorn Project is an inspired followup to The Phoenix Project, telling the same events from the perspective of technical contributors and digging much more deeply into key questions of team dynamics, leadership, automation, and misguided governance. Readers working in real-world IT or digital organizations will again find themselves nodding and grimacing in recognition that as an industry we have a long way to go; fortunately, Gene is continuing to light the way.” -- Charles Betz, Principal Analyst and Global DevOps Lead, Forrester Research
“The Unicorn Project takes you on a fun and imaginative journey into some of the most difficult IT and business challenges we face today. The project may be mythical, but the lessons and ideals encountered will provide real help to any leader seeking to unleash powerful potential within their organization. This should be required reading for any student, IT professional, or business leader who is serious about tackling data-driven digital disruption, customer focus, and workforce empowerment to deliver business value faster, better, safer, and happier.” -- Jason Cox
"Just as The Phoenix Project introduced the Three Ways, The Unicorn Project introduces us to the Five Ideals. By illustrating how these underlying principles enable a small group of rebels to drive meaningful organizational change, Gene is providing us with a blueprint to follow in our own organizations." -- Scott Stockton, Regional Vice President, Sonatype
“As important as The Phoenix Project was for managing organizational change, The Unicorn Project is for the vast majority of us who actually solve problems. This book provides a vision for software engineers for generations to come.” -- Dr. Tom Longstaff, Chief Technology Officer, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute
“If you read The Phoenix Project and wondered if the author had been following you around at work, then The Unicorn Project is going to give you a sense of deja vu.” -- Erica Morrison, Executive Director of Software Engineering, CSG
“A bona fide digital transformation, one that makes a worthy difference in customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and cash flow, is a hard-fought victory through a gauntlet of agonizing battles. Wins, losses, and the unexpected are inevitable, and true grit―a combination of passion, courage, and perseverance―is required. The Unicorn Project is the organizational civil-war novel that every technology and business trailblazer must read.” -- Christopher O'Malley, President and CEO, Compuware
"The Unicorn Project is an entertaining glimpse below deck of the chaotic IT ship and provides guidance on how to get everyone rowing together." -- Josh Atwell, Sr. Technology Advocate, Splunk
"DevOps fans around the world rejoice! The Unicorn Project fills in all the gaps that The Phoenix Project never got to cover! Automated QA, loose coupling and APIs, democratized access, psychological safety, balancing current work with innovation, and more. It's all in there! Do yourself a favor and read this now to know where your practice should head next." -- Stephen Fishman
“If you liked The Phoenix Project, you will absolutely fall in love with The Unicorn Project. This is the other side of the story that you need to fully understand modernized DevOps processes.” -- Dr. Branden R. Williams, Technology Executive
"Want to win in the digital economy? Read The Unicorn Project and take the bold steps framed in the Five Ideals and watch your people become your game-changers." -- Raj Fowler, Principal Consultant, DevOpsGroup
“Every company going through a digital transformation needs to make this a must-read for all leaders. Not only will they recognize and empathize with the struggles of Maxine and team, they will also find insights for success with the Five Ideals. This book gives a roadmap to the type of rebellion every organization wishes for.” -- Courtney Kissler, SVP Customer & Retail Technology at Starbucks
“In The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim clarified the what and why of DevOps. Now his latest book, The Unicorn Project, clarifies the what and why of digital transformation. Being great at DevOps without focusing on the customer means that you can be excellent at something that doesn't matter.” -- Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow, Microsoft
“The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project….It made me remember every step we've gone through at adidas in the last 4 years.” -- Fernando Cornago, Senior Director Platform Engineering, adidas
“What I loved about The Phoenix Project is that it made me feel not alone. Reading that story, I closely identified with the experiences the characters were having in the software development process. In The Unicorn Project, he's written another cure for the forsaken tech managerial nerd. And this time he's extended to another whole group in the world of technology―those who deal with data, analytics, reports, and predictive models. Anyone working with software or data analytics will feel a kinship to the characters and the problems the teams encounter in The Unicorn Project, and will cheer them on as they apply the Dev and DataOps best practices to succeed. It's scary how close the characters, dialog, and situations are to what we daily experience. Is Gene listening in to our beer-soaked after-work conversations? I wonder…” -- Christopher Bergh, CEO & Head Chef, DataKitchen
About the Author
Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher, and multiple award-winning CTO. He has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 and was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People to Watch Under the Age of 40” list, and he was named a Computer Science Outstanding Alumnus by Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.
He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and family.
Product details
- ASIN : B07QT9QR41
- Publisher : IT Revolution Press (November 26, 2019)
- Publication date : November 26, 2019
- Language : English
- File size : 7122 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 443 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #412,298 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #75 in Business Production & Operations
- #221 in Workplace Behavior
- #379 in Computers & Technology (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written six books, including The Unicorn Project (2019), The Phoenix Project (2013), The DevOps Handbook (2016), the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), and The Visible Ops Handbook (2004-2006) series. Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People to Watch Under the Age of 40” list, and he was named a Computer Science Outstanding Alumnus by Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.
He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and family.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book compelling, amazing, and well-written. They describe it as an insightful playbook for any company undergoing a digital transformation. Readers also appreciate the story quality, saying it presents a compelling narrative and is relatable.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book compelling, amazing, and fun. They appreciate the content delivered well, the flow of the book, and the story that keeps them interested until the last page.
"...to old server equipment, and C-level treachery make this a very compelling read...." Read more
"I really enjoyed reading the story of the Unicorn project. It was a well written and enjoyable novel...." Read more
"...technical terminology might pose a slight barrier, it's still a worthwhile read for anyone interested in understanding the digital landscape of..." Read more
"...The Unicorn Project, while an entertaining business novel, is chalk full of coding and other technical references that go right over my head...." Read more
Customers find the book amazing and insightful. They say it promotes a healthy understanding between all aspects of the software lifecycle. Readers appreciate the author's superb job of weaving technical topics into an engaging story. They also mention the book helps them understand and communicate issues they simply couldn't put into proper terms.
"...That being said, I still heartily enjoyed the book and learned a tremendous amount from reading it...." Read more
"...Alas, I rest my case. The Unicorn Project, is stellar on a variety of fronts; unlike the "Phoenix Projects" it covers the whole gamut of a..." Read more
"...Overall it was a decent enough books with some good lessons for people trying to help transform a company, and I would recommend it...." Read more
"...The book is so instructive that I plan on including it in the curriculum for the software architecture course that I teach at a local university...." Read more
Customers find the story compelling, relatable, and inspiring. They appreciate the delivery and writing. Readers also mention the book is filled with more concepts and stories to challenge thinking.
"...Gene Kim, the author, weaves an informative narrative around Maxine, a protagonist navigating through a stifling corporate landscape...." Read more
"...While I kinda knew what the content would be, the story was very enjoyable and confirmed some of my suspicions." Read more
"...Pros:- Good story. I did find Maxine's story engaging and relatable...." Read more
"...The characters are infinitely relatable and compelling and probably most importantly, tied to real world events/IT stories so that they are grounded..." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the believable characters. Some mention they seem real and believable, while others say they're almost worthless.
"...The characters are infinitely relatable and compelling and probably most importantly, tied to real world events/IT stories so that they are grounded..." Read more
"Where to start. Voice actor was terrible. She sounded the same for every character. I would get lost in who was talking. Story was just dumb...." Read more
"...and weaving them into an engaging story, with a cast of characters that are completely believable...." Read more
"...good story that's woven well with wonderful writing, brilliant character development and great callbacks to several of the situations and people..." Read more
Reviews with images
A well written novel about the crisis an IT company can go through.
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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This is the opening setup for Maxine Chambers, development leader and software architect at Parts Unlimited, Inc., in The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim's follow-up to The Phoenix Project. As stated in its subtitle, The Unicorn Project is "a novel about developers, digital disruption, and thriving in the age of data."
Kim brings together key concepts from Geoffrey Moore, Jez Humble, Donald Reinertsen, Mik Kersten, Mark Schwartz, Peter Senge, and stories from the trenches of transformation from the DevOps Enterprise Summit conference series to capture a blueprint for transformational success that's based on the perspectives and efforts of software engineers.
Not many novels bring to life the daily struggles of software engineers, so this comparatively rare mirror placed in front of us offers a welcome chance to reflect on a large set of key questions, such as:
• How close are we to the results of our efforts? Do we get to see our customers' delight?
• Can we execute quick experiments, get rapid feedback, and iterate?
• Are we fans of pragmatic programming, functional programming?
• How often are we bitten by mutability in our code?
• Are we satisfied in our work? If not, what might be some systemic causes of our dissatisfaction?
• Do our systems enable us to focus or are we continually context-shifting?
• Are we able to collaborate easily across functions and teams?
• Even better, have we reduced interdependencies to the absolute minimum?
• When things go wrong, does the organization focus on blame or on systemic corrections?
• Are we generating technical debt faster than we're paying it down?
• How much toil do we face every day? Unplanned work? Internal work?
• How do we carve out time for improvement, or even time just to think?
• What's the relationship between engineering and "the business" really like, here?
But despite all the instructional value in this book, it's very easy to get caught up in the drama of the story. Parts Unlimited is a very large, traditional enterprise that must transform to survive. The legacy of complex and entangled architectures, out-of-date processes, methods, and tools have generated a context in which innovation dies long before it can complete its journey to customers. A brave group of engineers form a "rebellion" to confront this legacy and create a lasting business transformation, both technological and cultural.
To organize the dramatic principles at work in the story, Gene Kim came up with The Five Ideals of DevOps:
1. Locality and Simplicity (reduce interdependency, own your code in production, microservices architecture)
2. Focus, Flow, and Joy (limit work in progress, make work visible, see the value of your contributions)
3. Improvement of Daily Work (pay down technical debt, streamline the architecture)
4. Psychological Safety (blameless culture, systems thinking, shared context)
5. Customer Focus (core vs. context, feedback)
Elements of the storyline are adeptly woven through these five ideals, clarifying each one and giving them practical weight. Plot twists, setbacks, sudden breakthroughs, a major RIF, taking a sledgehammer to old server equipment, and C-level treachery make this a very compelling read.
One of my favorite parts involves a QA joke Bill Sempf shared on Twitter: "QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv."
Although the speed at which certain miraculous improvements happen defies belief at times, the novel is full of inspiring tales of software engineers getting excited about better methods, shaking off the shackles of the status quo, and getting it done right.
Because this is a novel, the rest of the review is likely to contain spoilers.
The book consists of three parts. These parts are only labeled with dates, but they are roughly (1) the miserable current reality, (2) the rebellion, and (3) the unicorn project.
The first part, slightly larger than 100 pages, is a description of the current situation in Parts Unlimited. The main character, Maxine, is published for an IT failure and gets expelled to The Phoenix Project. This is a deadmarch IT project which is the absolute worst and unfortunately quite familiar for some of us that have been working in large organizations. This part describes in-depth how bad things are, perhaps even a bit exaggerated at times.
The second part starts when one of the people who do want to improve things (Kurt) becomes a development manager and is given the opportunity to do things differently. The other people who join him call themselves the rebellion and they adopt modern development (DevOps) practices to improve the development work. They convince Maggie from marketing that they can build and deliver a really important feature that might save the company.
The third part, the rebellion expands and needs a new name and becomes the Unicorn Project. They adopt modern development practices and some modern technology and with that dramatically improve the product. This leads to significantly increased revenue and they save the company. Next the company changes their focus to include more innovation so that it will be less likely that it will be disrupted by a competitor.
As said, the biggest plus for this book was that was easy and enjoyable to read. The lessons it tried to convey were mostly good, such as focus on developer efficiency, automated builds, test, and deployment, and modern technologies and architectures. It introduce "the five ideals" which seem useful principles for improving product development.
I was disappointed that some of the above mentioned concepts were not explained in-depth. But my biggest disappointed was that it seemed to miss some ideas completely and didn't seem to offer a long-term way forward for a product development organisation. Let me clarify a bit. The first part was a perfect description of what happens in development when you create narrow-focused functional and component teams who do not collaborate (or just collaborate through tools). Then the second part starts breaking some of these silos and moves to a more cross-functional approach, yet they still *seem* keep team-code ownership rather than moving through cross-team code ownership. It wasn't completely clear as the teams were still structured around the architectural components, yet the author referred at least a couple of times to them as feature teams. Closely related, the book showed well how you can get things done cross-teams when you have a clear #1 priority (expedited development), but it didn't cover how an effective development organization would be structured so that all the teams can work effectively, not just the ones that work on the expedited features.
In conclusion, I would give the book 3 stars for content and 4 stars for writing and story. As it is a novel and I did enjoy it, I'll round it up... 4 stars.
The book's main principles are embodied in the Five Ideals: Locality and Simplicity, Focus, Flow and Joy, Improvement of Daily Work, Psychological Safety, and Customer Focus. Through these, I got a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to implement change in a rigid system.
Maxine's journey in redefining the errors of 'The Phoenix Project' showcases the interconnectedness of business and technology. It underlined the significance of balance and harmony within an organization's different functions.
"The Unicorn Project" extensively covers DevOps, presenting it not just as a toolset or process, but as a culture and philosophy that promotes constant learning, collaboration, and innovation. However, the frequency of technical jargon used may make it challenging for those not deeply entrenched in the tech field.
Despite being heavily rooted in technology and software development, the book carries a broader appeal due to its engaging narrative style. Even though the extensive use of technical terminology might pose a slight barrier, it's still a worthwhile read for anyone interested in understanding the digital landscape of modern businesses.
Top reviews from other countries
Once you make it through the first 100 pages it all becomes really great to read.
I highly recommend it.





