by Gene Kim
Maxine notes how Matt has repeatedly linked the customer symptoms with car parts that they likely need. She sees why certain store managers outperform others, not just in customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and retention, but also with the best sales per square foot. Matt is teaching all these desired behaviors to the new employees.
“It would be great if the computer systems could tell us who’s purchased multiple batteries so that we could proactively make that recommendation,” Kurt adds.
“That would be terrific,” Matt says. Turning to include the trainees in the discussion, he continues, “As you know, we don’t pay sales commissions, because we’ve found that this sometimes leads people to do things that aren’t in the best interest of our customers. But everyone gets a handsome bonus if we exceed our sales targets, and that will naturally happen if we all do what’s right for them.
“So now you know something about battery inspection, which results in this report that you’ll give the customer,” Matt says, showing a sevenpage report.
As her second training day winds down, Maxine thinks about the hardships the in-store employees face when using the systems they’ve built. Instead of feeling discouraged, Maxine is inspired. Fixing these problems will make the jobs of in-store employees easier, who will then be able to better keep their customers’ cars running.
Throughout the weekend, Maxine had also been getting a steady stream of updates from the rest of the Rebellion. They’ve been working furiously to help the Promotions teams get the data they need for the big, upcoming Black Friday holiday campaign. But they’re starting to encounter challenges, including conflicting definitions of data across all the enterprise silos, tough choices about what database technologies would best support the Promotions effort, and lots of unanticipated problems now that they’re working directly with the data scientists and analysts.
Maxine is looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow and seeing everything up close and personal. There are so many exciting things to do!
PART THREE
November 10–Present
CHAPTER 14
• Monday, November 10
On Monday morning, Maxine is startled. The team has exceeded her expectations once again. They are all gathered in a conference room to quickly review status and talk about areas where they need help.
“Before we start, there’s something I think we need to do,” Maggie says. “We really need a code name for this effort. If we’re working toward something big, we need to have a name. The more we accomplish, the more we’re going to have to talk about what we’re doing, and we can’t keep referring to ourselves as the Rebellion.”
“What’s wrong with Promotions?” someone asks.
“Well, that’s the name of the team,” she responds. “But the team has changed so much since our friends from Data Hub have joined, and there are so many new initiatives we’ve started. I think we need a new name because the way we’re working is so different than before.”
The ideas start flying fast and furious. Serious names are proposed: Ulysses, Phaethon, Iliad … and names from the US space program: Mercury, Apollo, Gemini …
“They’re so serious, and they sound too much like Phoenix,” Shannon says. “I wouldn’t want anyone to think there’s any similarity between what we’re doing and the way the Phoenix Project turned out.”
“Totally,” Brent says. “It wouldn’t bother me at all if we salted the ground to make sure no program is ever named ‘Phoenix’ again.”
“How about from movies? Like Kill Bill, Blade Runner, Star Wars?” suggests Shannon. Others propose names of music bands, Pokémons, board games, weapons from Dungeons and Dragons …
“How about the Unicorn Project?” suggests Dwayne, obviously half-joking. “That’s pretty distinctive.”
Maxine laughs out loud. She loves it. The term “unicorn” is often used to reference high-flying tech startups and the FAANGs that Erik talked about—the Facebooks, Amazons, Apples, Netflixes, and Googles of the world. Parts Unlimited is a century-old horse, but they are out to prove that they can do everything the unicorns can, with the right culture, technical practices, and architectures to support them. In fact, what is a unicorn besides a horse with a horn and painted up with some fancy rainbow colors?
And in our case, Maxine thinks, our competition is not the FAANGs—it’s the other horses in our industry and tiny little software startups that are encroaching on our market. Startups have lots of ability to do things, she knows from personal experience, but they’re always lacking the resources to do them.
This is not a story about small beating large; it’s fast beats slow. What the past couple of months have decisively proven to her is that greatness can be stifled, but it can also be restored.
“I love it,” Maxine says. “Can you imagine Steve saying ‘unicorn’ during every Town Hall? Let’s do it.”
Everyone laughs. Dwayne says, “Umm, are you sure this will fly? Do we need to get approval for this?”
Maxine laughs out loud. “Approval? Since when do you feel like you need approvals from anyone? No, this is up to us. Yeah, the Unicorn Project,” Maxine tries it on for size. “Let’s do it.”
They decide that the Unicorn Project is the new name for the customized recommendation and promotion capabilities that, among many other things, will power the Black Friday and holiday promotion campaigns, and hopefully many more in the future. Orca is the name for the analytics and data science teams who will be working alongside and supporting the Unicorn promotion efforts. And Narwhal is the new database and API gateway platform that is being created that Unicorn will use. Unikitty is the name of the continuous integration and deployment platform being used by the Data Hub team, and some other carefully chosen teams in Phoenix.
Maxine is pleased. In hindsight, giving the team a unique name is probably long overdue. She’s always loved the Tuckman phases of teams, going through form, storm, norm, and perform. She’s ready to start norming and performing!
And team 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.
“You know, I’m also going to have say ‘unicorn’ in front of everybody,” grouses Maggie. But Maxine suspects that Maggie is secretly pleased.
Later that morning, Maxine is back in the auditorium for the bi-monthly Town Hall, her second since her exile, and the first since the disastrous release a month ago. She is especially interested to see how Steve will address that topic. Maggie told the team that she’ll be presenting one slide to the entire company about their hopes and aspirations for the Black Friday campaign.
Just like the last time, Maxine grabs a seat as close to the stage as possible. But this time, she’s surrounded by her teammates. Kurt is sitting in the row behind her, and she is excited to see Maggie backstage being wired up with a microphone.
At exactly nine, Steve comes on stage and welcomes everyone to his sixty-seventh Town Hall. He promises to talk about vision and mission, as well as annual goals. He says, “I also want to take some time to address all the problems associated with the Phoenix rollout and our hopes for the upcoming Black Friday campaigns.”
As he has in every previous Town Hall, he talks passionately about the Parts Unlimited mission to help hard-working customers keep their cars running so they can conduct their daily lives. After spending an entire weekend working with the in-store manager and new frontline staff, Maxine has gained a tremendous appreciation for how Steve’s relentless repetition of these organizational goals are reflected in the daily work of so many people at the company.
“Our business is one that depends on operational excellence and superb service. We make a simple promise to customers: that we will provide parts and services that help keep their cars running. When we released Phoenix into production, we let everyone down. We let our customers down, we let our employees down, and we let our investors down.
“
We made promises to customers that we couldn’t keep. Merchandise we offered them wasn’t in stock or couldn’t be purchased, and we even accidentally disclosed hundreds of credit card numbers. We’ve given away millions of dollars in vouchers to customers we let down, but we can’t buy back the trust we lost.
“And it’s not just our customers. Many of our critical internal systems were down, preventing thousands of employees from doing their daily work. As CEO of the company, I take responsibility for this.
“I want to recognize everyone in this room who did absolutely everything they could to help fulfill our obligations to our customers. Many of you know that for the last two months, I’ve also been acting as the head of technology,” he says. “Don’t laugh, because as you know, I need a lot of help with anything technology-related. And I want to acknowledge all the amazing things that the technology teams did.
“Since then, I’ve been working with Chris Allers, VP of R&D, and Bill Palmer, VP of IT Operations, to do some radically different things. Among them was the thirty-day feature freeze. Everyone in technology worked on fixing problems and paying down technical debt.
“For those of you not in technology, ‘technical debt’ is what creates hardship, toil, and reduces the agility of our software engineers,” he continues. “It’s like a spreadsheet that’s grown over years to the point that you can’t change it anymore without breaking formulas or introducing errors. But technical debt affects us at a much vaster scale, involving systems that run the most complex processes in the company.
“I’ve been hearing from people across the organization that this was badly needed,” he says. “Just like in manufacturing, where I come from, 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 plant. And that’s what we’re doing here.
“This quarter is make or break. We promised the world that we’d get Phoenix out in September, but because of all the features we delayed, we’re not getting the sales benefits that we hoped for. Now we’re well into the quarter, with the holiday buying season right ahead of us. We are out of time.
“Here to talk about what we’ve learned is Maggie Lee, our senior director of retail product marketing,” he says. “Come on out, Maggie.”
Maggie looks as nervous as Maxine has ever seen her, but most people would never notice. Maggie says, “As you know, Phoenix has always been about helping customers buy high-quality parts they need from us faster, easier, and cheaper. Over the years, we’ve built the groundwork to make that happen, but we haven’t been able to activate those capabilities … yet.
“Thanks to Steve, Chris, and Bill, I’ve had the privilege of working with a team made up of a cross-section of the entire company, including Finance and Accounting, Marketing, Promotions, Retail Operations, and of course, an incredible technology group to figure out how we can deliver a small but extremely important set of Phoenix goals. We want to generate great customer recommendations and enable the Promotions team to sell profitable products that we have in inventory,” she says. “We have years of customer purchasing data, and because of our branded credit cards, we know our customer demographics and preferences. If we can get those promotions to the customer, we think we can make a real difference to the company and create incredible value for our customers.
“And that’s why I’m excited to introduce the Unicorn Project,” she says, smiling as everyone in the audience laughs at the whimsical name. “I’d like to recognize Kurt Reznick and Maxine Chambers who approached me a short time ago with a radical idea to make this happen, along with a group of engineers who wanted to help. We have all been working with the support of the entire Phoenix Project, toward the goal of having incredibly effective campaigns in support of Black Friday, one of the highest selling seasons of the year. Our goal is to break all the records and make it the top selling day in company history.”
Maggie continues, “We will be conducting a series of tests over the next two weeks to ensure that things go right when we launch the campaign to millions of customers on Black Friday,” she says. “Thank you and wish us luck,” Maggie smiles, waving to everyone and shaking Steve’s hand before exiting the stage.
“Thank you, Maggie,” he says. “There are some who say this won’t work, including some people who championed the Phoenix Project for many years. But Maggie and her team have made me a believer. In my career, I’ve found that 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, because they’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen. So … good luck to the Unicorn Project!”
Maxine cheers and whistles loudly. She also notes Steve’s oblique reference to Sarah and her absence today. She looks around and confirms that she is nowhere to be seen, wondering whether that’s good news or bad news.
For the next couple days, the team is entirely focused on the work required to generate winning promotions by Black Friday. Everyone is buried with urgent work. Maxine again brings up with Kurt the need for more experienced people to help.
“I’m way ahead of you,” he says. “I got Chris to bring in William from his leave of absence and I’m bringing him over to help the Unikitty team.”
“No way,” Maxine says, incredulous. She laughs, thinking about how Chris probably reacted. “How’d you manage to get him back from his indefinite leave of absence?”
Kurt laughs. “Let’s just say I called in every favor built up over years of doing good. I had them all lobby Chris to bring back William. There’s no better person to help us get these environments working. It also feels great that he’s back from his unjust exile.”
Maxine heartily agrees and is again impressed with Kurt’s ability to deliver the things that the teams need, able to navigate the organization in a way very different than the official org chart would suggest.
Meanwhile, the Narwhal team is trying to figure out a workable API gateway and database solution given all the things the various teams need. The stakes are very high. The amount of data they’ll be dealing with is huge, and the consequences of it not working would be disastrous.
This is an ambitious undertaking, but one that dazzles Maxine. Narwhal will shield everyone from almost all the API problems that Cranky Dave had complained so much about, often without any need to change the back-end systems. It will serve as a central place where developers can easily access the data they need and easily find other company data that might be able to help solve their business problems, often from distant silos. And Shannon has been helping ensure that Narwhal will keep all this data secure, enforcing policies around authentication and PII anonymization.
A major part of Narwhal is that it will often store copies of the major company systems of record—anytime that the back-end systems are too slow, too difficult to change, or too expensive to actually conduct all the transactions they need.
“We’ve got to make a decision,” Dwayne says in a big meeting that he pulls together late Wednesday afternoon. To Maxine he says, “Believe it or not, all of us are strongly in favor of a pure NoSQL solution. We think it’s the fastest way to get all the data we need into a place that we control and satisfy the performance needs of the Unicorn team.
“Brent and the team have two NoSQL clusters running, one for Test and one that we could use for Production,” Dwayne says. “And data ETL process … uhh extract, transform, and load … is going better than we thought. We have an extended team cobbling together a bunch of technologies to copy data from nearly twenty different systems of record into our database, using a combination of commercial and homegrown tools. The good news is that it’s going faster and more quickly than we thought …
“But here’s our conundrum,” he says. “We were planning to keep all the data in both NoSQL and MySQL databases, just in case the NoSQL option blows up. But after the ETL experiences and some large-scale tests, we think we should ‘burn the ships’ and go p
ure NoSQL. Supporting two back-end databases is going to slow us down, and we won’t get any of the productivity advantages we were aiming for.”
“Whoa,” she says, surprised. This was a much more daring approach than Maxine expected. In fact, it was probably decisions like this that caused people to create the TEP-LARB.
No one in the company had used NoSQL in production in a significant way, let alone for something so large and mission-critical. Usually Maxine thinks prudence and practicality would disqualify such a risky approach for such a high-stakes project, especially when there’s so little time to research and gain real-world production experience. She says as much to the team.
“Normally I’d agree, Maxine. You’d think the biggest risk would be operational,” Brent says, seeing her concerned expression. “But I think the far bigger risk is losing relational integrity between all these tables that we’re copying from everywhere in the enterprise. As you know, a NoSQL database won’t enforce relational integrity like most databases we’re used to. But I’m comfortable that we can enforce it at the API level.”
Although nerve-wracking, Maxine admits that it is exciting to see technologists at the top of their game working to solve an urgent business problem. Maxine asks a bunch of questions, sometimes repeatedly, and scrutinizes their thinking. But by the end, they’ve all convinced each other to go all-in on NoSQL.
“Okay, let’s burn the ships,” Maxine finally says. There’s just no time for any other option. She does not like this level of uncertainty, but she trusts the team.
The developer agility this will enable is undeniable, but more than ever, Maxine realizes how engineering constrained they were. To work with more systems, they really needed a bigger team. She reminds herself that this again will be the first topic to discuss in her next meeting with Kurt.
