Jonathan Rasmusson - Competing with Unicorns

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There are a lot of people to thank for making a book like this happen. Andy Hunt for creating a wonderful company for aspiring authors, and Michael Swaine for all the wonderful edits. All the reviewers: Marcus Hammarberg, Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Gary Bergmann, Kristian Lindwall, Diana Larsen, Luu Duong, Aleksandr Kudashkin, and David W. Robinson whose feedback made this book better. My lovely wife Tannis whose help and support enable me to write. And to all the great people at Spotify who showed me a better way of working. Specifically my managers Marcus Frdin and Kristian Lindwall for continuously challenging me to reach higher and go further.

Thank you Mom and Dad for all your love and support.

Todays tech unicorns develop software differently. They dont do textbook agile. They certainly dont do Scrum. What they do do is something completely different. Something that enables them to scale like an enterprise while working like a startup.

This book is about taking you behind the scenes, and showing you how the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, and Spotifys of the world do it.

• How they scale
• How they organize
• How they empower
• And how they trust

In essence how they work.

This will not only help you and your teams work better. It will give you insight into how these companies move so fast, innovate so quickly, and what the rest of us need to do to compete and keep up.

While you are of course free to jump to any section of the book at any time, there is some method to the madness.

The first chapter of the book explains what the world of software delivery looks like through the eyes of a startup and what traditional companies need to rediscover to compete in the future on product.

The middle chapters of the book will give you a sense of what working at one of these tech companies feels like and some of the profound differences in how tech companies are led, organized, and aligned versus more traditional ones.

The last part of the book then dives into culture and explains the cultural differences between how unicorns work versus the rest of us in more traditional companies. Turns out we all value the same thingsunicorns just value them differently.