The Unicorn Project

• After all, making developers more productive is always super important
• About a bad leader: "Last year, she had a different pitch every Town Hall, promising a totally different transformatino then what had been presented before, causing lots of confusino, organization whiplash, and eventualls ridicule.
• "You developers always make sure features take priority, and you never clean up all the technical debt you create..."
• The reason Dave is so good is that he never asks for permission!
• "This company is run by a bunch of executives with no clue about technology, and project managers who want us to follow a bunch of arcane processes. I'll scream at the next one who wants me to write a Product Requirements Document.
• Now you can prototype most features in the time it takes to even write one page of a PRD.
• It's just like the TV show Survivor, all the technology executives are just trying to last one more episode
• You've created a system where small teams of engineers are able to work productively and independently of each other, with components painstakingly and splendidly isolated from each other, instead of being complected into a giant, ugly, knotty mess. (API, microservices,...)
• It requires focus and elevation of improvement of daily work, even over daily work itself. Without this ruthless focus, every simple system degrade over time. increasingly buried under a tundra of technical debt.
• Tech giants give Dev productivitiy responsibilitities to only the most senior and experienced engineers
• Five ideals
1. Locality and simplicity. design things for locality in systems and organization. In everything we do.
2. Focus, Flow, and Joy. How our daily work feels.Work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work
3. Improvement of Daily Work. Elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself. Learning.
4. Psychological Safety. We make it safe to talk about problems because this requires prevention, which requires honesty and this requires absence of fear.
5. Customer Focus. Ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers. Are they willing to pay us for it?
• Making Brent productive:
• Taken me off of every mailing list
• Turn off notifications from every chat room
• not to answer the phone for anyone
• Someone is assigned to read all emails and phone calls and yell at anyone trying to get ahold of me.
• Every tech giant has nearly been killed by technical debt
• They became to encumbered by technical debt they could no longer deliver what their customers demanded
• Business people are completely oblivious that technical debt even exists.
• All the tech giants, at some point in their history, have used the feature freeze to massively rearchitect their systems.
• Satya Nadella 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.
• Innovation and learning occur at the edges, not the core. Problems must be solved on the frontlines, where daily work is performed by the world's foremost experts who confront those problems most often
• For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.
• In order to speak clearly, you need to be able to think clearly. And to think clearly, you usually need to be able to write it clearly.
• Writing things down enforced a logical rigor that he thought was very important for leaders to have.
• It's been true for hundreds of years and probably thousands more: employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that mattter. If we do it right, and manage cash effectively, every other financial target will take care of itself
• The HIPPO effect (Highest paid persons opinion) - people unhealthy tendency to only care what the highest-level decision-maker thought.
• Every week we will create time for everyone in the company to learn. For two hours, everyone is expected to teach something or learn something.
• She was going to be the first distinguished engineer in the companys history, reporting directly to the CEO
• She is excited that there is finally a career ladder for individual contributors and brilliant technologists without having to become managers
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