David Colborne reviewed The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim
60% of the time the advice works 100% of the time
3 stars
"The Unicorn Project" tries to pick up where "The Phoenix Project" left off by pitching a world where developers and engineers manage to move fast and try things — and occasionally break them.
Towards the end of the book, it was clear the author started to see some of the political and financial pratfalls inherent in the approach being pitched — and how overly optimistic his vision was — but flinched before he drew away from his preconceived conclusion. Though the author is correct that legacy institutions can process and policy themselves to death, it's also true that many institutions have middling developers and engineers — not the eternally curious and preternaturally competent engineers leading the Rebellion in the book — but need to execute anyway. In the real world, many of the processes and policies exist to keep the "gifted and talented" from running amok beyond their actual …
"The Unicorn Project" tries to pick up where "The Phoenix Project" left off by pitching a world where developers and engineers manage to move fast and try things — and occasionally break them.
Towards the end of the book, it was clear the author started to see some of the political and financial pratfalls inherent in the approach being pitched — and how overly optimistic his vision was — but flinched before he drew away from his preconceived conclusion. Though the author is correct that legacy institutions can process and policy themselves to death, it's also true that many institutions have middling developers and engineers — not the eternally curious and preternaturally competent engineers leading the Rebellion in the book — but need to execute anyway. In the real world, many of the processes and policies exist to keep the "gifted and talented" from running amok beyond their actual (as opposed to perceived) limit of expertise — and also exist to ensure those who are less competent or confident know where their lanes are and how to function with them.
Put more directly, the book did an excellent job of describing how to create small skunksworks projects that can deliver internal value but spent little time describing how to safely bring those into existing operations. Instead, the book hand waved over the process, threw in some artificial political and financial pressure to boot, and then hoped readers wouldn't notice that it served as much as a recipe to distract subscribing organizations on new and shiny projects over the dull but important work that keeps them in business.
