---
title: "The Unicorn Project"
type: Book
date: 2024-08-17
rating: 3
author: "Gene Kim"
year: 2019
status: Finished
tags:
image: the-unicorn-project.jpg
colorSortKey: [0, 125, 7]
---


I loved [[The Phoenix Project]], this book's spiritual and literal predecessor — while I quibbled with the prose and characters, I deeply enjoyed not just the _concept_ of a ludocratic narrative but the execution of it was such that I felt like I learned a good amount about management and scaling a technical organization.

The Unicorn Project is meant to be the same book as The Phoenix Project, except with a more specific _software engineering_ focus rather than a general IT focus — and this, perhaps, is where it all falls apart to me, because unlike general information technology I now have a good deal about best practices in high-performing software engineering organizations, and as such I had nothing to learn from this book except that man, Kim is _not_ good at fiction-writing.

This is not meant to be a condemnation of the book's recommendations! Kim walks through the importance of reproducible builds, continuous integration, functional programming: all good things, all important things, all things that anyone who has spent time in a FAANG already knows as good. If you're _not_ one of those people (and I don't mean this in a dismissive way, I promise) — the book might be more useful.

But I was hoping for a book that teaches how to go from an 80th percentile organization to a 95th percentile organization, and this book is a primer instead on going from a 10th percentile organization to a 70th percentile organization. 