
The Unicorn Project
A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
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Narrated by:
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Frankie Corzo
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Written by:
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Gene Kim
About this listen
The Phoenix Project wowed over a half-million readers. Now comes The Unicorn Project!
“The Unicorn Project is amazing, and I loved it 100 times more than The Phoenix Project…” (Fernando Cornago, senior director platform engineering, Adidas)
“Gene Kim does a masterful job of showing how … the efforts of many create lasting business advantages for all.” (Dr. Steven Spear, author of The High-Velocity Edge, sr. lecturer at MIT, and principal of HVE LLC)
“The Unicorn Project is so clever, so good, so crazy enlightening!” (Cornelia Davis, vice president of technology at Pivotal Software, Inc., author of Cloud Native Patterns)
This highly anticipated follow-up to the best-selling title The Phoenix Project takes another look at Parts Unlimited, this time from the perspective of software development.
In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals.
One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies.
The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms - this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity.
©2019 Gene Kim (P)2019 Gene KimYou may also enjoy...
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- A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win 5th Anniversary Edition
- Written by: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
- Narrated by: Chris Ruen
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in 90 days, or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of the Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined.
-
-
Mostly obvious, painfully amateurish writing.
- By Denis Robert on 2019-07-01
Written by: Gene Kim, and others
-
Measure What Matters
- How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
- Written by: John Doerr, Larry Page - foreword
- Narrated by: John Doerr, full cast, Julia Collins, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that the Objectives and Key Results system has spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.
-
-
Nothing but marketing material for OKRs
- By Jon Jon on 2019-01-05
Written by: John Doerr, and others
-
Multipliers, Revised and Updated
- How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
- Written by: Liz Wiseman, Stephen Covey - foreword
- Narrated by: Liz Wiseman, John Meagher
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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-
-
All surface level, no actual MEAT
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Written by: Liz Wiseman, and others
-
How Innovation Works
- And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
- Written by: Matt Ridley
- Narrated by: Matt Ridley
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.
-
-
A Must Read!
- By Anonymous User on 2022-11-01
Written by: Matt Ridley
-
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
- Written by: Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
- Narrated by: Nicole Forsgren
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter - that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance - and what drives it - using rigorous statistical methods.
-
-
Eyes opening research results about IT industry
- By Pablo de Oliveira Castro on 2021-10-16
Written by: Nicole Forsgren PhD, and others
-
What You Do Is Who You Are
- How to Create Your Business Culture
- Written by: Ben Horowitz
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times best-selling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building.
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Great
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What listeners say about The Unicorn Project
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bob
- 2021-08-31
Outstanding Storyline
I’ve never read a book about coding and found this story fascinating. It really held my interest throughout, especially the corporate back-biting and solutions to so many problems. I’m going to read The Phoenix Project as well but this story held its own without having read the prior story.
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- Windsordrew
- 2019-12-11
Excellent listen.
This book is an excellent listen. The content should be read by CEO through developers.
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- J Chambers
- 2021-06-30
easily digested tech story
I zipped through listening to this book on a recent work trip and found myself cheering for the rebellion.
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- Christopher
- 2020-07-21
Worked in this Enviroment
I worked in this environment its hard seeing a success is great. I liked how it tied in nicely to the Phoenix Project.
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- DS
- 2019-12-05
A book for all technology professionals
An engaging novel, frighteningly relatable documentary and DevOps textbook all wrapped into one brilliantly curated classic that serves as a guiding star for all IT professionals. I love this book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Trevor
- 2023-12-01
Meh
Frankie Corzo being a good narrative voice is probably the only reason I finished this. The Unicorn Project tries very hard to be The Phoenix Project, and it just can't hold a candle to it.
tldr; read/listen to The Phoenix Project instead and forget this one exists.
I genuinely don't understand what the core purpose of this book was. The Phoenix Project was a very good book, and had real learning moments. I was hoping that this book would be the same. Unfortunately, The Unicorn Project is a modern-day fiction that merely borrows the name and some characters of The Phoenix Project.
Throughout the book, the circlejerk of "oh no, <xyz problem> that is the end of all that exists!" that is then overcome through determination, skill, or whatever blackbox plot twist, over and over and over again for 5 hours straight is exhausting and, in my opinion, detrimental to anything that the book is trying to impart on the reader between the fluff. The problems that arise become irrelevant, and I became less and less interested in how or why they were overcome. The book uses incredibly technical jargon and niche name dropping of tech throughout, which is unnecessary. The cringe writing about typical "nerd" things, like Star Trek and Star Wars and comparisons to them is nearly unbearable. By the end of the book, I had no idea what the book was even about, I was just glad it was over and I could say I finished it. Had this book been condensed to a 3-4 hour listen, it would have been much more enjoyable.
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- Ahmed Khalifa
- 2020-01-16
Patronizing!
There was an old SNL sketch on Al-Gore where he says "People say they don't like me because I sound patronizing", he takes a deep breath then adds "Patronizing means I talk to them like they are stupid"!.
I just found that sketch playing in my head over and over as I was listening to this book, or to be precise, the first 20 minutes of it, it is too late to return it, and I for sure will not bother finishing it.
if you have been living in a cave for 10 years and you just got out? this is 'maybe' a 'tolerable' thing to go through, but anything short of this, you will find this book an absolute waste of time, unless you like a book that explains to you the benefits of having electricity and fast-moving vehicles!
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7 people found this helpful
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- Ev Haus
- 2020-06-27
Outdated and repetitive
Was hoping this would be a more up to date version of the Phoenix Project but this was literally the same story just from another angle. The content here is too outdated for 2020 in my opinion. Most software companies I've seen are already well established in these practices and the challenge is actually much more nuanced. The story is also highly repetitive, with the same content repeated in way ways across chapters. Gave up around Chapter 11 because it just wasn't entertaining or helpful anymore.
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4 people found this helpful