The Unicorn Project cover art

The Unicorn Project

A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

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The Unicorn Project

By: Gene Kim
Narrated by: Frankie Corzo
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About this listen

The Phoenix Project wowed over a half-million readers. Now comes The Unicorn Project!

“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 best-selling 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.

©2019 Gene Kim (P)2019 Gene Kim
Leadership Management Management & Leadership Business Technology Software Software Development Fantasy Project Management Software Architecture Software Leadership

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All stars
Most relevant
I loved the Phoenix project and this is better in the way that it covers how IT & the ‘Business’ need to work together and focus on what their real ‘Customers’ want.

Another great book about transforming business & IT.

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The core idea of this book is to take a set of ideals commonly held within the software industry and develop a narrative to show their value. In this, I think the book does an excellent job.

I'm a software engineer so I was unlikely to disagree with the core ideas in the book. However I couldn't help thinking that I wish those working in less technical roles could read the book in the same way. I don't think the book would be suited to them due to its underlying assumption that reader is an engineer.

In all I really enjoyed the book. The final third dragged a little bit. The best bits tended to be where I could see my own experiences mirrored in the story.

The narration was clear and not distracting but it wasn't particularly engaging. Assuming the narrator doesn't happen to work in software I think she did a good job reading passages that must seem bizarre to the average person.

Software engineers will recognise everything

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A great follow on the The Phoenix Project. Probably needs to be listened to twice to catch all the details.

Inspirational - great way to visualise DevOps

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If you are tired of people using DevOps as a buzzword, and not really knowing that it really means to developers then this book is the perfect intro. The novel genre is so much better than a regular text book at communication the DevOps mindset in a way that you can relate to if you are in software development. I often found myself laughing are the tragic situations describing unrealistic deadlines, kafkaesque processes and top management visions having lost touch with reality - so easy to relate to from my 12 years in software development.

Note of caution: once you get your DevOps-Aha-moment you will have a hard time going back to your silo.

Perfect intro to DevOps for developers

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A great read (listen) and a worthy sequel to the Phoenix Project and maybe even more important for developers. Very interesting if embarking of CI/CD.

A worthy sequel to the Phoenix Project

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