Unicorn Project: My Personal Review — A must read!

Unicorn Project: My Personal Review — A must read!

I am honored and humbled to be asked to review Gene Kim’s latest book: The Unicorn Project. A bit of context, I’ve been a huge advocate for cross-team initiatives that include developers, product, operations, security, and the business to collaboratively work on solving problems. Being a security leader, I’ve always said that security should not get in the way to drive business goals or even innovation. Security professionals should be willing to get into the details of the ask and work alongside those teams to make sure that things are being done safely. There are plenty of ways of how to achieve compliance and security processes and requirements and have those achieved by the great collection of technologies out there or those that can be built internally.

Story background

The Unicorn Project is a companion to other great pieces written by Gene such as The DevOps Handbook and The Phoenix Project. Gene does a great job at introducing all the characters and context around Phoenix Project that it is not required to read The Phoenix Project before reading this book (Although, I highly recommend that you do!). The story continues describing how a company called Parts Unlimited and their challenges of driving better technology in an industry that is mostly known for retail and manufacturing. The amount of procedural red tape and technology debt that the teams are battling are not unique. The problems depicted by Gene’s masterful story are faced by most companies, one way or the other.

Target Audience

While I can guarantee that almost every technologist will enjoy this book, I recommend anyone who works for a company that’s driven by technology or heavily investing in technology (So every company, IMHO) to read this. The deeply rooted restrictions depicted in the story can be associated to any firm and/or team.

What I got out of it

Being a security leader, I loved how a Parts Unlimited Security Engineer was able to support such critical initiatives for Parts Unlimited as part of the Unicorn Team. Ensuring that data was properly protected and available was key to the narrative of the story. This is the message that I have been driving everywhere I go, where Security needs to be joined at the hip with every other team particularly Engineering and Operations. Security and operational improvements work hand to hand and should be key factors and responsibilities of every team while Information Security is there to assist by building products that help the company and teams move forward. The old way of walking around with clipboards or passing requirements for teams to implement does not scale and increases the levels of friction between best practices and velocity.

Additionally, I loved the perseverance of a few who decided it was worth it to break the rules and peeling the red tape to drive improvements. Using understanding, caring about each other, persuasion, and challenging each other to learn and improve. Every company needs a Rebellion as named in the story. Historically, the World has changed thanks to rebellion. Technology is no different.

Putting things together

I love reading about stories like the ones depicted in this book. I can only hope that the mindset of solving problems and relentless pursuit of better ways continues growing and we can all one way or the other collaborate to building a better and safer space. Would love to hear your impression of the book or any other feedback. Please reach out to me via Twitter or LinkedIn!