The Unicorn Project

Sometimes we tolerate daily workarounds, like manually creating an environment or manually performing a deployment. We make a grave mistake when we don’t realize how much this impacts our future productivity.”

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, still has a culture that if a developer ever has a choice between working on a feature or developer productivity, they should always choose developer productivity.

“Back to 2002—that same year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote his famous memo to all technologists, stating that they must rearchitect their systems so that all data and functionality are provided through services.

Amazon likely spent over $1 billion over six years rearchitecting all their internal services to be decoupled from each other. The result was astonishing. By 2013 they were performing nearly 136,000 deployments per day.

“For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.

No one will take risks, experiment, or innovate in a culture of fear, where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news,”

we need psychological safety, where it is safe for anyone to talk about problems.

psychological safety was one of the most important factors of great teams:

psychological safety was one of the most important factors of great teams: where there was confidence that the team would not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.

“When something goes wrong, we ask ‘what caused the problem,’ not ‘who.’

The leader must constantly model and coach and positively reinforce these desired behaviors every day.

Containers are immutable, unable to be changed after they’re created, so if it works in Dev, it will almost certainly work in Test.

loves—in infrastructure, almost everything you do has a side-effect that mutates the state of something in the environment, making it difficult to isolate and test changes, as well as diagnose problems when things go wrong.

infrastructure, almost everything you do has a side-effect that mutates the state of something in the environment, making it difficult to isolate and test changes, as well as diagnose problems when things go wrong.

“Every time we have an outage, we’ll be conducting a blameless post-mortem like this one. The spirit and intent of these sessions are to learn from them, chronicling what happened before memories fade.

“Every time we have an outage, we’ll be conducting a blameless post-mortem like this one. The spirit and intent of these sessions are to learn from them, chronicling what happened before memories fade. Prevention requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear. Just like Norm Kerth says in the Agile Prime Directive, ‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’

The goal is to enable the people closest to the problem to share what they saw, so we can make our systems safer. The only rule is that you can’t say ‘I should have done X’ or ‘If I had known about that, I would have done Y.’ Hindsight is always perfect. In crises, we never actually know what’s reallyl going on, and we need to prepare for a future where we have an equally imperfect understanding of the world.”

my career, I’ve found that whenever you have a team of people who are passionately committed to achieving a mission and who have the right skills and abilities, it’s dangerous to bet against them, because they’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen.

When everyone knows what the goals are, as Erik predicted, teams will self-organize to best achieve those goals.

Now, you need to show Steve and Dick how the future requires creating a dynamic, learning organization where experimentation and learning are a part of everyone’s daily work.