The Unicorn Project

by Gene Kim

  “Sign me up!”

  It’s Saturday morning. Maxine is in front of the bathroom mirror making sure her “Hello, My Name Is Maxine: How Can I Help?” name tag is straight.

  She’s very excited to finally take part in this program. Famously at Parts Unlimited, every leader at the director-level or higher must work in the stores as a front-line employee twice a year. Not as a high-falutin’ store manager, but as a regular employee behind the register or out on the floor. This is something that Parts Unlimited has been doing since they opened in 1914.

  Maxine quickly says goodbye to her family, who are lounging in the living room on various forms of technology, and dashes to her car. She doesn’t want to be late for her first day of in-store training. Maxine is a stickler for punctuality and expects that the store manager she’ll be reporting to is likely the same way.

  The previous evening, she spent three hours watching YouTube videos on home car maintenance with her kids. She’s relieved that changing the oil on a 1984 Toyota Tercel is exactly the same as it was twenty years ago. An oil change is an oil change since the invention of the internal combustion engine. Even now, Maxine still refills the windshield wiper fluid in her family’s cars, refusing to pay someone to do it for her. However, it’s been decades since she’s changed her own oil or transmission fluid.

  When Maxine walks into the store, she immediately feels out of place. She sees four young men and one woman, all in their twenties, and an older man in his forties.

  Mildly irritated that she’s not the first person here, she joins the semi-circle facing the store manager, Matt. Maxine recognizes him from having been in the store before. He’s in his early thirties and looks almost like a drill sergeant. He glances at his watch and gives Maxine a small nod and smile of recognition.

  “Good morning. I’m Matt, the store manager. I’m here to help orient all of you, our new employees, who will be working at either this store or one of the four stores within a sixty-mile radius. You’re all lucky; since Elk Grove is where our corporate headquarters is, there are some store amenities here that none of the other nearly one thousand stores have.

  “Parts Unlimited was started in 1914, and we still pride ourselves on being the very best at catering to the needs of the home mechanic. We don’t sell luxury items to the rich and famous. We serve the needs of people like us, who depend on our cars to get to work every day, to drive our kids to school, who need reliable transportation to go about our daily lives.

  “At our stores, we aim to provide our customers the parts they need to keep their car running. Often, we are all that exists between a working car and a very expensive trip to the garage or service station that ties up their car for days. Our job is to help them avoid that fate.”

  Maxine has goosebumps. She is struck by how consistently Matt communicates the company vision. It could be Steve delivering these lines from the Town Hall. It’s so great to hear this from the store managers. It’s very different from hearing executives or plant managers say it, because it’s here on the front lines where it matters most.

  “Over the next two days, I’ll be showing you the duties of working at a Parts Unlimited store and all the tools you need to become experts at helping our customers,” Matt says. “And there is a test at the end, so pay attention—nearly one-quarter of the people who go through this training do not pass their first time. So to help you keep notes and prepare for the exam, here’s a set of Parts Unlimited manuals and notebooks and pens so you can take notes. There is a prize for the highest score.”

  She looks around at her fellow students, resisting the urge to view them as the competition. They’re just kids, she thinks.

  Matt begins a tour of the store floor, describing the broad categories of items and why they stock them. He points to a rack of large, thick books. “These are the books that you’ll use to help your customers.” They look like the huge phone books Maxine grew up with, four inches thick with razor thin newsprint paper.

  “Your customers will often come in looking for a replacement part or with a problem that you need to diagnose,” Matt explains. “Your job is to help them find what they need. If we have it in stock, you will sell it to them. If we don’t have it in stock, you will do what it takes to find one of our stores that does stock it. We have a website that anyone can use, but it’s very difficult to actually source the parts you need. The best way to find the answers are in these books.”

  Maxine looks dubiously at the row of books. She hates the idea of technology being beaten by a pile of books and makes a note to find out what makes the current application so cumbersome to use.

  “It is very important that you get this part right,” he says. “If you sell someone the wrong brake pads, they may find out only after they’ve jacked up their car, taken all the wheels off, and struggled to figure out why the parts won’t fit. Or worse, they find out when they are trying to slow down on a highway or after they’ve crashed into a tree.

  “We think of ourselves like doctors,” Matt continues. “We do not want to hurt our customers. And the best way to avoid doing that is by making sure we get them the right parts the first time. We do that through these books.”

  Matt picks one up and asks everyone to do the same. “You have a customer that has a 2010 Toyota Tacoma, and he needs floor mats for the back seat. What part number should we sell them?”

  Maxine reluctantly picks up one of the books. In this century, she thinks, in a modern commercial enterprise, we still rely on looking up things in a paper book? This is like using a card catalog at the library. Which, she remembers, her kids have never heard of.

  She flips through the book. It’s organized alphabetically by make, then model, and then by year. She flips three-quarters through, jumping to the Toyotas, the Tacomas, and then 2010.

  She groans at what she sees. Even for the 2010 model year, there’s table after table of all different configurations. Number of engine cylinders, size of engine, standard cab, extended cab, short wheelbase, long wheelbase … and for variation, there are a bunch of parts.

  One of the younger men says, “Depends on what configuration the truck is. What kind of cab is it?”

  “Exactly,” Matt says, smiling. “Finding the right part is based on a number of factors. And often, the customer won’t know. When that happens, you walk out to their car with them and help them find the information. The fastest way is to record all the information on this little sheet.” He holds up a piece of paper. “This helps ensure you only have to go out to their car once.”

  “Yes, Maxine?” Matt says when Maxine raises her hand.

  “Isn’t there a way to use the computer to find out this information?” she asks, not wanting to give away that she already works for Parts Unlimited.

  Matt chortles. “Trust me, this is so much easier. After I show you how to do this on paper, we’ll use the computer systems and you’ll see why we recommend everyone just do it by hand.”

  This is embarrassing, she thinks. We go through all the trouble of building these systems to serve our employees, but what we generate for them is so inadequate that they still use antiquated paper systems.

  By the end of the day, Maxine is exhausted. She’s learned far more about car maintenance and diagnosis than she expected. She had no idea how much time the in-store employees spend helping customers figure out why cars won’t start or what the strange noises coming from their engines mean.

  Accurately diagnosing the problem is important, because they can help the customer avoid going to a service station. There are many examples of service stations taking advantage of their customers, charging for work they don’t need.

  Helping their customers fix problems themselves often saves them thousands of dollars. On the other hand, employees also need to know which problems are way beyond the scope of do-it-yourselfers, such as when there is actual damage to an engine or when the problem involves the electronic engine management systems.

  But Maxine is also exhaust
ed from seeing the constant inadequacies of the computer systems supporting in-store employees. Matt was right—using the system was a nightmare. Once you knew the VIN and the part you needed, looking up certain out-of-stock parts required using a 3270 terminal session and keying in commands. This is the famous “green screen” mainframe interface, which most people have seen but few have used.

  Maxine is always in awe when she sees the best airline gate agents use systems like this for making complex flight changes at the airport. Someone needs to book a flight to Boston, because their flight was canceled, but needs contiguous seats for their family, but doesn’t want to incur a change fee. An experienced agent will rapidly type out all the keystrokes required to find what options are available, running circles around another agent using the “modern graphical user interface.”

  There’s no question that with practice some of these in-store applications are extremely efficient. After all, Maxine loves the SPSS statistics package that was born during the mainframe era, battle-tested for decades, so she can run circles around people using the more modern tools, such as Jupyter notebooks, Python, R, and Tableau. But despite her evangelizing and objective evidence of superiority, people find SPSS alien and strange.

  That’s why Maxine knows that some of these in-store systems prolong the period required for employees and managers to learn how to effectively manage a Parts Unlimited store. And she knows people on many mainframe teams want to improve their UX but have been denied budget for years.

  The process of ordering out-of-stock parts is even worse. You pull up inventory reports from other stores, which are months old. Then you need to pick up the phone and call each store to verify that they have a certain part, reciting eleven-digit product codes.

  If the part is in stock, the person on the other end of the phone keys in a parts transfer order into the system. The easiest part in the entire process is carrying the part to the loading dock, where it will be picked up by a delivery truck and delivered in the next day or two.

  When she couldn’t take it anymore, she asks Matt, “If you could have a system that, you know, looked like Amazon to do parts lookups and execute transfer orders, would that be useful to you?”

  Matt immediately answered, “Oh, my gosh, yes. I don’t actually want my employees spending twenty minutes looking things up in books or talking to other store employees by phone. I want them in front of our customers. In our regional operations meetings, we’ve complained endlessly about it for years, but corporate keeps saying they’re working on it. It would be a gamechanger for us. We’d have faster service, happier customers, and the right parts in-stock more often.”

  He points at the counter behind the register. “Inside those cabinets are racks of tablets that corporate deployed to the stores. Trouble is, all the apps make you fill out so many fields that they’re even harder to use than the computers. At least the computers have real keyboards. No one has used a tablet in months.”

  In her head, Maxine does a silent face-palm. Clearly, not enough technologists are spending time in the stores observing the outcomes of the products they create.

  After she gets home, she plays with their second new puppy, Marshmallow, a dog disguised as a big, cute, white ball of fluff. Incredibly, it was Jake’s idea, and Maxine couldn’t believe that they drove two hours yesterday to pick him up with their kids.

  After the kids disappear into their rooms and her husband insists on taking the two dogs for a walk, Maxine takes out her laptop and spends an hour typing up a trip report. She lists all her observations divided by area of the store employee’s daily work and applications they have to interact with. It’s nearly twelve pages by the time she’s done.

  She’s always been a prolific notetaker. She remembers reading somewhere, “In order to speak clearly, you need to be able to think clearly. And to think clearly, you usually need to be able to write it clearly.” Which is why she takes the time to write out the document, so that people can understand what she observed. She objectively describes what she observed, often attaching pictures she took with her phone, and in other places she makes recommendations.

  Before Parts Unlimited, Maxine worked for a CEO who actually wrote white papers himself, which were widely read among their customers and employees. She once asked why he bothered to spend time writing when he had Marketing staff to do things like that.

  He said he thought it was important to think through problems clearly, and for him, writing things down enforced a logical rigor that he thought was very important for leaders to have. “How can you send a company down a strategic path when you haven’t thought through what all the implications are?”

  That left a lasting impression on Maxine. Ever since then, especially as she has become more senior, she makes sure that she takes the time to write things out, which also enables her to more broadly influence things.

  She knows some things that she observed yesterday don’t belong in her head. They need to be in front of the people whose daily work it is to write and maintain the applications that the in-store employees rely on.

  When she finishes her draft an hour later, she closes her laptop. She knows everyone won’t read her document, which means she’ll have to give a presentation on it. Luckily, she took lots of pictures today, but far fewer than she normally would have—none of the other trainees were taking any and she didn’t want to stand out.

  She quickly sends a note to Kurt and Maggie in a chat room:

  Here’s my Day 1 trip report. I’m seeing tons of things I can’t unsee. Lots of easy things we can address that will help advance Promotions’ goals.

  I’m attaching my unedited report. Kurt, can you join me in training tomorrow? There’s a bunch of things that we could help with, even if it’s not right away.

  The next morning, Maxine takes the shirt she was wearing yesterday out of the dryer, cursing when she realizes she’s going to need to iron it. There’s no way I’m showing up in a wrinkled shirt, she thinks.

  She shows up at the store fifteen minutes early, just as she likes it. To her delight, Kurt says he’ll be able to make it later in the morning.

  When the other trainees arrive, they all follow Matt to the service garage. There has been a multi-year pilot to outfit some of their larger stores with these garages. They’ve been an incredible hit with customers.

  This morning’s training was diagnosing car batteries. One of the top reasons customers come to the stores is because their cars won’t start.

  “This is just an introduction to the basics. You won’t be able to do this solo until you work with someone who’s already been trained and certified.” They stand next to a fifteen-year-old Honda Accord with a technician wearing a Parts Unlimited coverall uniform working on attaching cables to the battery and connected to a stack of instruments.

  Matt explains the steps as the technician works. “And now she enters the data into the computer, which we use to generate a diagnostic report for the customer.” Maxine watches with interest as Matt continues his explanation, occasionally asking the technician questions about the work she is doing.

  Kurt walks into the service bay while they’re watching the technician work. He’s wearing a Parts Unlimited uniform just like her, complete with a “Hi, My Name Is Kurt” name tag. His shirt is slightly wrinkled. He must have been in a hurry this morning because he’s typically pretty fastidious.

  Kurt stands next to Maxine, and Matt nods at him and smiles.

  Maxine watches the technician work. After a minute, she can’t help asking, “Why do we have to enter so much data? If this person is a repeat customer, do we still have to type all of this in?” Maxine tries to sound as much like her peers as possible. This is their onboarding experience that she is intruding upon, and she doesn’t want to do anything that will detract from it.

  Matt laughs, turning to the technician, “How much rekeying of information do you have to do for each diagnostic?”

  The technician, wearing a “Hi, My Name
Is Emily” name tag, shakes her head. “It feels like a lot. Typing the customer address takes time, but the Vehicle ID Numbers are the worst. They’re seventeen characters and very easy to mistype. And I still have to put in the make, model, and year. In most of our other systems, all that is filled in for us from the VIN. Some people around here just put garbage into the VIN fields, but that doesn’t seem right to me.”

  “I still don’t get it. Why do we have to type in so much information?” the youngest trainee asks.

  “Corporate wants us to,” Matt says, eliciting laughs from the trainees. Even the twenty-somethings seem world-weary, as if they’ve already dealt with back-office bureaucrats.

  They have no idea what being trapped in a real corporate bureaucracy is like, Maxine thinks, recalling her ordeal in the Phoenix prison.

  “Seriously, though,” Matt continues, “we want this information because the company is working on customer profiles. Someday, when a customer walks into a store, we’ll know who they are, what cars they own, what the makes and models are … so that eventually we won’t have to rekey that information. I know there’s an initiative, years in the making, to get portable scanners in here so that we can just scan the VINs.”

  Maxine sees Kurt purse his lips in frustration, even though he’s been here less than five minutes. Good, Maxine thinks. Now I’m not the only one who is frustrated. She has confidence Kurt will translate that frustration into action, somewhere, somehow.

  Maxine peers at the computer in the diagnostic rack. It’s some sort of desktop PC attached to an LCD screen, as well as some sort of peripheral bay that has USB and serial ports and some other attachment that she doesn’t recognize.

  She hears Matt say, “When you’ve got customers coming in repeatedly for battery problems, it’s probably because they’re not driving the car frequently, letting the battery charge drop below the levels needed to start it.” He continues, “When you see this, recommend getting a car battery charger that can keep those batteries topped off. I love mine, and since I’ve had it, I’ve never had to jump-start any of my cars. We have a bunch of different types, from twenty-five to a hundred dollars. I bought this forty-nine dollar model.”