The Unicorn Project

buckling under her stare. Maxine let’s him squirm.

Creating software should be a collaborative and conversational endeavor—individuals need to interact with each other to create new knowledge and value for the customer.

Although long hours are sometimes glorified in popular culture, Maxine views them as a symptom of something going very wrong.

when people can’t get their builds going consistently, disaster is usually right around the corner.

I shared everything I know with them, which they were extremely grateful for.

I shared everything I know with them, which they were extremely grateful for. Always good to give more than you get—you never know who can help you in the future. Networking matters.

Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.

The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.

Each decision is a commitment to support it for years or even decades—these

Your teams are able to add features at a rate that the entire Phoenix team should envy. And that is only possible because you pay down technical debt as a part of daily work.

First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity.

First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity. We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. And we need simplicity in everything we do.

First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity. We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. And we need simplicity in everything we do. The last place we want complexity is internally, whether it’s in our code, in our organization, or in our processes.

“The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy. It’s all about how our daily work feels. Is our work marked by boredom and waiting for other people to get things done on our behalf? Do we blindly work on small pieces of the whole, only seeing the outcomes of our work during a deployment when everything blows up, leading to firefighting, punishment, and burnout?

“The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy. It’s all about how our daily work feels. Is our work marked by boredom and waiting for other people to get things done on our behalf? Do we blindly work on small pieces of the whole, only seeing the outcomes of our work during a deployment when everything blows up, leading to firefighting, punishment, and burnout? Or do we work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work?

The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. Reflect upon what the Toyota Andon cord teaches us about how we must elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself.

Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, where we make it safe to talk about problems, because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear. In manufacturing, psychological safety is just as important as physical safety.

the Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they willing to pay us for it or is it only of value to our functional silo?”

Being able to test and push code to production is more productive, makes for happier customers, creates accountability of code quality to the people who write it, and also makes the work more joyful and rewarding.

Sometimes we tolerate daily workarounds, like manually creating an environment or manually performing a deployment.