The Unicorn project Gene Kim

• Always good to give more than you get - you never know who can help you in the future. Networking matters.
• You can get rid of loops entirely using iterators, it's an easier, and much safer, way to write a loop.
• Learning Clojure, her favorite programming language, was the mots difficult thing she had overdone, because it entirely removes the ability to change (or mutate) variables.
• How executives are so disconnected from the daily work. It was not helpful for Sarah to remind everyone of how "saving the universe" depends on Phoenix. And it was not helpful for John to appel to their "moral sense of correctness". The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.
• There is nothing so rewarding as providing something to someone who really needs your help. She needed help and she received it.
• The satisfaction of helping people must be reward enough, right?
• Its' such a pain to get things from Operations through normal channels.
• I remember your group. You were one of the best-prepared in the whole company.
• A different way of working, bypassing the normal organizational lines of communication.
• Incredible perseverance, focus, and never taking "no" for an answer.
• I can't believe how the bureaucracy and silos have taken over.
• And that is what an effective network is all about - when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart.
• The lack of trust and too much information flowing around is causing things to go slower and slower.
• I really think this group can make a big difference.
• It's your job to safeguard the most important projects in the company.
• Technical debt is what you fell the next time you want to make a change.
• First ideal of locality and simplicity in our code and organizations.
• Think about the engagement scores of the technology employees versus the rest of the business and ponders the different.
• The last place we want complexity is internally in our processes.
• The first ideal - Locality and Simplicity
• The second ideal - Focus, Flow, and Joy
• The third ideal - Improvement of daily work
• The fourth ideal - Psychological safety
• The fifth ideal - Customer focus
• No one talks about the real problem. Most people aren't brave enough to say what they think or to do the right thing.
• Being able to test and push code to production is more productive, makes for happier customers, creates accountability of code quality to the people who write it, and also makes the work more joyful and rewarding.
• It can be fun to be at the center of everything, but it's certainly not sustainable. Down the road, only chronic wakeup calls, exhaustion, cynicism and burnout await.
• We're going to need a lot more clarity from leadership on this.
• Amazon likely spent over $1 billion over six years rearchitecting all their internal services to be decoupled from each other.
• It is ignorance that is the mother of all problems, and the only thing that can overcome it is learning.
• TWWADI: The Way W've Always Done It.
• The famous Andon cord is just one of their many tools that enable learning. When anyone encounters a problem, everyone is expected to ask for help at any time, even if it means stopping the entire assembly line.
• Each adds to the coordination cost for everything we do, and drives up our cost of delay. And because the distance from where decisions are made and where work is performed keeps growing, the quality of our outcomes diminish.
• For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.
• Inspirational communication, personal recognition, and supportive leadership.
• Fourth ideal of Psychological safety: no one will take risks, experiment, or innovate in a culture of fear, where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news.
• The fourth ideal asserts that we need psychological safety, where it is safe for everyone to talk about problems.
• If you see something that could hurt someone, you must fix it as quickly as possible.
• Third ideal of improvement of daily work and the fourth ideal of psychological safety.
• The QA team uses a different ticketing system, we don't have access to it.
• We've been waiting almost a year for anonymized customer data.
• We're in a relay race, and we need to get the baton handed to you.
• Small batch sizes, like in manufacturing, create a smooth flow of work, with no jarring disruptions or catastrophes.
• So we need a ticketing system to manage those complex flows of work. But it's so easy for people to lose sight of what the purpose of all this work is.
• This fast and frequent feedback is such a big part of achieving the second ideal of focus, flow and joy.
• How to deliver better value, sooner, safer, and even happier.
• Knowing that you may only need the smallest nudge to buy.
• We have to synchronize with everyone else's release schedules.
• Years of over-promising and under-delivering.
• Unless, of course, there's an urgent business need with a powerful sponsor.
• What about 'don't rock the boat' and 'stay in your lane' do you not understand?
• They think that we are the bottleneck, but we 're always waiting for them.
• Long before the feature ever gets to development, it goes through the funding approval process, which often takes over a year.
• We don't have a fast value stream.
• I need product managers who are working side by side with the teams who are building what will achieve our most important business objective.
• "World as imagined" colliding violently with the "world as it actually is".
• Fostering a culture of psychological safety.
• How tenuous and fleeting the conditions that enable psychological safety can be.
• Needing a nudge to complete their work.
• 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.
• Including conflicting definitions of data across all the enterprise.
• Lots of unanticipated problems now that they're working directly with the data scientists and analysts.
• FAANGs: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google
• Tuckman phases of team going through form, storm, norm and perform.
• And them names help create an identity for the entire group, not just for individuals, and they reinforce the notion that team goals are more important than individual goals.
• But we can't buy back the trust we lost.
• It's important to have a sustainable work pace and to limit our work in process to make sure that work keeps moving through the plan.
• 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.
• Able to navigate the organization in a way very different than the official org chart would suggest.
• A NoSQL database won’t enforce relationnel integrity like most databases.
• It was trying to create a unified vocabulary and taxonomy that they could use, because almost every business system had different names for similar things.
• Daily engineering team standups
• With blockers being urgently handled by the team leads.
• This is what you get for waiting too long to invite the day scientists to the engineering meetings.
• 2004 Google Map/Reduce research paper was published, which described the techniques Google used to massively parallelise the indexing of the entire internet on commodity hardware. This led to the invention of Hadoop, Spark, Beam.
• This new scheme would allow a massive decoupling of services and data.
• Data is the lifeblood of the company.
• Understanding our customers and providing what they need.
• Sounds like a great plan
• Everyone, we have a plan. Let’s make it happen.
• When everyone knows what the goals are, teams will self-organise to best achieve the goals.
• Creating a culture where people felt safe to experiment, to learn and make mistakes, and where people make time for discovery, innovation, and learning.
• The future requires creating a dynamic, learning organisation where experimentation and learning are a part of everyone’s daily work.
• Suggestions were put into production to improve safety, to reduce toil, to increase quality, and to increase flow.
• The more parochial goals that they don’t care about, wether it’s your internal plans of record or how your functional silos are measured.
• Net Promoter Score to rate customer satisfaction. We ask our customers, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely it is that they would recommend our stores to their friends. The 9s and the 10s are promoters, the 7s and 8s are neutral, and the rest are detractors from the percentage of promoters. An NPS score of thirty is considered good, and above fifty is great.
• Improvements in employee engagement and morale.
• Employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that matter.
• Dr. Geoffrey Moore “Crossing the Chasm”
• Lead time from idea to market offerings matters.
• Almost all business investment now involves software.
• What if psychological safety is as much of a precondition to dynamic, learning organisations as physical safety?
• Those successful efforts that she is so proud of are now going to cause a bunch of innocent people to lose their jobs.
• Asking everyone to do more with less.
• A plan to eliminate $2 million from the IT organisation, that’s about fifteen people across all of your groups.
• Long term, we don’t want to manage our dependencies, we want to eliminate them.
• Cores are the central competencies of our organisation. Context is everything else. It’s the cafeterias, shuttles between buildings, and the thousands of things companies must do to operate. They’re often mission-critical, such as HR, payroll and email. Bu t our customers do not pay us for the great payroll services we provide to our employee.
• Fifth ideal, of being truly customer-centric instead of being silo-centric.
• Those middle managers are your interface between strategy and execution.
• The HIPPO effect (or Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), referring to people’s unhealthy tendency to only care what the highest-level decision-maker thought.
• ODB-II
• Blameless post-mortem.
• What’s needed is focus and urgency, and the modern methods of managing the value creation process.