by Gene Kim
“Great times are truly ahead, Maxine,” he says.
“You’re so right, Erik. Small doesn’t beat big,” Maxine says. “Instead, fast beats slow. And fast and big will win almost every time. The Unicorn Project has shown us that.”
From:
Alan Perez (Operating Partner, Wayne-Yokohama Equity Partners)
To:
Steve Masters (CEO)
Cc:
Dick Landry (CFO)
Date:
4:51 p.m., January 11
Subject:
Meet up for drinks?
Steve,
I’ll be the first to admit that when I heard you present to the board a little over a year ago, I thought you were crazy. Even if I did believe you about “employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow” being the only things that matter.
Frankly, I could not see Parts Unlimited being a growth play, let alone doing it through software. But you’ve vaulted the company into the highest range of growth that we see in our portfolio. And given the significantly higher multiples that the markets put on growth (vs. value and profitability), your company was one of the best performers in our portfolio last year.
Despite my initial skepticism, I’m very happy that you’ve proven me wrong. Suddenly, I’ve become a bit of a hero in our firm. We’ve got many investments, some of which were once the most recognized brands in their respective industries. They could definitely benefit from a similar digital disruption. I now wonder how we can help those companies win in their markets.
I’ll be in Elkhart Grove for the next board meeting. Let’s meet for drinks the evening before? I’d love to learn more about how you did it and get your thoughts on how it might be applicable to some of our other portfolio companies.
See you soon, Alan
JOB DESCRIPTION:
DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER
Sponsor and cultivate a culture of technical excellence through the following activities:
Grow our next generation of technical leaders through mentoring, sponsorship, and formal training programs.
Establish and participate in cross-team guilds focused on technology areas like security, performance, site reliability.
Guide the creation of a governance and architecture review function that can evolve and ensure company obligations are fulfilled for years to come. Review important issues that management is concerned about.
This function will include risk and assurance, information and e-records, and architecture.
Provide technical assistance to any team seeking feedback on their approach.
Develop measures to keep governance capabilities and their staff hands-on and relevant.
Be the company spokesperson to technical audiences to advance the company brand and facilitate recruiting, competing with the top technology companies for talent.
Oversee the architecture, design, and implementation of Shamu, the enterprise event-sourcing platform to replace Data Hub, and timeline to transition all enterprise services to use it.
THE FIVE IDEALS
The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity
The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy
The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work
The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety
The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus
REFERENCES
The Unicorn Project was heavily influenced by many books. Listed below are, in my opinion, some of the best in the relevant bodies of knowledge from which we drawn upon most:
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim (IT Revolution, 2018).
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox (North River Press, 1984).
The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear (McGraw Hill, 2010).
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen (Celeritas, 2009).
Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten (IT Revolution, 2018).
A Seat at The Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz (IT Revolution, 2017).
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell (Portfolio, 2015).
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Perez (Edward Elgar Pub, 2003).
Transforming NOKIA: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change by Risto Siilasmaa (McGraw-Hill, 2018).
This story was inspired by so amazing and heroic stories from the DevOps Enterprise community. Many infrastructure elements were inspired by Jason Cox (The Walt Disney Company) and Fernando Corango (adidas), architectural and development elements by inspired by Scott Prugh (CSG), and event sourcing architecture by Scott Havens (Walmart Labs). The Dockside Bar was modeled after Café Intención, where adidas held regular meetings to plan and eventually pitch their leadership on a digital transformation. This led to the creation of their platform team.
Over the years, I’ve also been inspired by many lectures, talks, videos, articles, tweets, and personal correspondence with people I admire. I’ve included many of the ones that directly influenced moments in The Unicorn Project below, presented in the order that they appear in the book.
Chapter 2
“Fireside Chat with Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3H1E2lY_ig.
Chapter 3
Zachary Tellman, Elements of Clojure (LuLu.com, 2019).
Chapter 6
“The PMO is Dead, Long Live the PMO - Barclays,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-fol1vkPlM.
“Better Value Sooner Safer Happier - Jon Smart,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKrhdyjGoM8.
Chapter 7
Rich Hickey, “Simple Made Easy,” InfoQ, recorded at QCon London 2012, posted June 20, 2012, https://www.infoq.com/presentations Simple-Made-Easy-QCon-London-2012/.
Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim (IT Revolution, 2018).
Ward Cunningham, “Ward Explains Debt Metaphor,” wiki.c2.com, last edited January 22, 2011, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WardExplainsDebtMetaphor.
Chapter 8
“What people think programming is vs. how it actually is,” YouTube video, posted by Jombo, February 22, 2018, https://www.youtube.com watch?v=HluANRwPyNo&feature=youtu.be.
Ryan Naraine, “10 Years Since the Bill Gates Security Memo: A Personal Journey,”ZDNet, January 13, 2012, https://www.zdnet.com article/10-years-since-the-bill-gates-security-memo-a-personal-journey/.
Bill Gates, “Bill Gates: Trustworthy Computing,” Wired, January 17, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2002/01/bill-gates-trustworthy-computing/.
Risto Siilasmaa, Transforming NOKIA: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change (McGraw-Hill, 2018) Kindle, 49.
John Cutler (@johncutlefish), “Case in point (from actual org) * In 2015 reference feature took 15-30d. * In 2018 same (class of) feature took 150-300d primarily bc of 1) tech debt, and 2) fast track silver bullets to drive success theater and/or acquisitions (for same effect) Cc: @realgenekim @mik_kersten” Twitter, September 29, 2018.
John Allspaw, “How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day – John Allspaw,” YouTube video, posted by ITRevolution, from the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M.
“Guide: Understand Team Effectiveness,” ReWork, accessed August 21, 2019, https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/.
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell (Portfolio, 2015).
“Quote by W. Edwards Deming,” The W. Edwards Deming Institute, February 1993, https://quotes.deming.org/authors/W._Edwards_Deming/quote/10091.
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen (Celeritas, 2009).
The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Steven J. Spear (McGraw Hill, 2010).
“Convergence of Safety Culture and Lean: Lessons from the Leaders,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFMJ3V4VakA.
Jeffrey Snover (@jsnover), “I literally (and yes I do mean literally) wanted to hide under my desk. I knew that they wouldn’t be able to tell who did it (downside of DomainOS) so … making the phonecall was one of the hardest things I’ve every done.” Twitter, November 17, 2017, https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/931632205020913664.
“Paul O’Neill of Safety Leadership,” YouTube video, posted by Steve Japs, February 7, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gvOrYuPBEA&t=1467s.
“Paul O’Neill The Irreducible Components of Leadership.wmv,” YouTube video, posted by ValueCapture, Mar 22, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htLCVqaLBvo.
Chapter 9
Bill Sempf (@sempf), “QA Engineer walks into a bar. Order a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.” Twitter, September 23, 2014, https://twitter.com/sempf/status/514473420277694465.
Chapter 12
Mik Kersten, “Project to Product: Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrjvbTlirnk.
Chapter 13
John Allspaw, “How Your Systems Keep Running Day after Day – John Allspaw,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M&t=2s.
DD Woods, STELLA: Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping with Complexity (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University, 2017) https://snafucatchers.github.io/.
Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations (IT Revolution, 2016).
Gene Kim and John Willis, Beyond The Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution of DevOps (IT Revolution, 2018).
“DOES15 – Courtney Kissler & Jason Josephy – Mindsets and Metrics and Mainframes … Oh My!” YouTube video, posted by DevOps Enterprise Summit, from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88_y1YFsRig.
Chapter 14
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjar Ghemawat, MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Lage Clusters, (Google Inc., 2004) https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf.
Christoper Bergh, Gil Benghiat, and Eran Strod, The DataOps Cookbook: Methodologies and Tools that Reduce Analytics Cycle Time While Improving Quality (DataKitchen, 2019).
“From Startups to Big-Business: Using Functional Programming Techniques to Transform Line of,” YouTube video, posted by Microsoft Developer, May 8, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCzCaiWgLM.
“Forging a Functional Enterprise: How Thinking Functionally Transforms Line-of-Business Applications,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5S3hScE6dU&=&t=5s.
Chapter 16
Stacey Vanek Smith, “Episode 724: Cat Scam,” Planet Money, NPR, March 13, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/13/703014256/episode-724-cat-scam.
“Digital Transformation: Thriving Through the Transition – Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKyF8fzed0w&feature=youtu.be.
“Zone to Win – Organizing to Complete in an Age of Disruption, by Geoffrey Moore,” YouTube video, posted by TSIA, November 6, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsV_cqde7w8.
“GOTO 2016 – Zome to Win – Geoffrey Moore,” YouTube video, posted by GOTO Conferences, December 7, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG4Lndk-PTI&t=391s.
“Digital Transformation: Thriving Through the Transition – Jeffrey Snover, Mircosoft,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHxkcndCQoI&t=1s.
“Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How Fining and Fixing Faults is the Path to Perfection,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4XMoHhireY.
Chapter 17
“DOES14 – Steve Neely – Rally Software,” YouTube video, posted by DevOps Enterprise Summit 2014, November 5, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcvCR5FDvH8.
“Typescript at Google,” Neugierig.org, September 1, 2018, http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-google.html.
Chapter 19
Kim, Humble, Debois, and Willis, The DevOps Handbook.
“More Culture, More Engineering, Less Duct-Tape (DOES17 US) – CSG International,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCKONS4FTX4&t=247s.
XI IOT - Facefeed Application Deployment Guide,” Nutanix Workshops website, accessed August 20, 2019, https://nutanix.handsonworkshops.com/workshops/e1c32f92-1de8-4642-9d88-31a4159d0431/p/.
Compuware (compuwarecorp), “The racks keep leaving and space keeps opening up in our #datacenter, but our #mainframeswill never leave! #alwaysandforever #ibmz #hybridIT #cloudcomputing #cloud” Instragram, September 7, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnb8B4iAQun/?utm_source=ig_embed.
“Keynote: Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones – Simon Wardley, Researcher, Leading Edge Forum,” YouTube video, posted by CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation], May 6, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlNYYy8pzB4.
XI IOT - Facefeed Application Deployment Guide,” Nutanix Workshops website, accessed August 20, 2019, https://nutanix.handsonworkshops.com/workshops/e1c32f92-1de8-4642-9d88-31a4159d0431/p/.
Epilogue
“Open Source is the Best Insurance for the Future: Eddie Satterly Talks About IAG,” YouTube video, posted by The New Stack, December 5, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0rcNAzLzj4&t=2s.
“DevOps at Target: Year 3,” YouTube video, posted by IT Revolution, from DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FMktLCYukQ.
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Perez (Edward Elgar Pub, 2003).
“Risto Siilasmaa on Machine Learning,” YouTube video, posted by Nokia, November 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNMy7NCQDgk&t=3721s.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so grateful to Margueritte Kim, my wife and partner, whose love and support makes all my work and life possible. And to our sons, Reid, Parker, and Grant.
Thank you to Anna Noak, Kate Sage, Leah Brown, Ann Perry and the entire IT Revolution team for helping me throughout all the stages of development of this book—if you only knew how much they had to put up with!
I want to thank the following people for the incredible amount of time they spent sharing their expertise with me—this book would not be possible without them. I learned so
much from them about the automotive parts industry, architecture principles, business and technology leadership, functional programming, and so much more!
John Allspaw (Adaptive Capacity Labs), Josh Atwell (Splunk), Chris Bergh (Data Kitchen), Charles Betz (Forrester), Jason Cox (Disney), John Cutler (Amplitude), Stephen Fishman (Salesforce), Dr. Nicole Forsgren (Google), Jeff Gallimore (Excella), Sam Guckenheimer (Microsoft), Scott Havens (Jet.com/Walmart Labs), Dr. Rod Johnson (Atomist), Rob Juncker (Code42), Dr. Mik Kersten (Tasktop), Dr. Tom Longstaff (CMU/SEI), Courtney Kissler (Nike), Chris O’Malley (Compuware), Mike Nygard (Sabre), Joe Payne (Code42), Scott Prugh (CSG), Mark Schwartz (Amazon), Dr. Steven Spear (MIT/The High-Velocity Edge), Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft), and John Willis (Botchagalupe Technologies).
And thank you to the following people who provided such amazing feedback on the manuscript: Paul Auclair, Lee Barnett, Fernando Cornago, Dominica DeGrandis, Chris Eng, Rob England, Alan Fahrner, David Favelle, Bryan Finster, Dana Finster, Ron Forrester, Dawn Foster, Raj Fowler, Gary Gruver, Ryan Gurney, Tim Hunter, Finbarr Joy, Sam Knutson, Adam Leventhal, Paul Love, Dr. Steve Mayner, Erica Morrison, Steven Murawski, Scott Nasello, Shaun Norris, Dr. Tapabrata Pal, Christopher Porter, Corey Quinn, Mark Schwartz, Samir Shah, Nate Shimek, Randy Shoup, Scott Stockton, Keith Swett, Branden Williams and Michael Winslow.
To everyone who helped me over the years, and to anyone who I may forgotten, my deepest thanks. And if you want to learn more about the concepts covered in the book, I’ve included a list of resources in the reference section.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gene Kim is a multi-award winning CTO, researcher, and author. He was the founder of Tripwire and served as CTO for thirteen years. His books include the bestselling The Phoenix Project (2013) and The DevOps Handbook (2016), the highly anticipated The Unicorn Project (coming 2019), as well as Beyond the Phoenix Project (2018), Shingo Publication Award–winning Accelerate (2017), The Visible Ops Handbook (2004), and Visible Ops Security (2006).