People I follow
Gene Kim
The Phoenix Project was the first book that made my day job make sense, and Accelerate gave me evidence to back the instincts. Most of how I think about intake, flow, and release traces back to his work. When something in our operating model feels off, his books are where I look first.
My operating principles are built on Gene’s work. The Phoenix Project taught me to treat intake, bottlenecks, and unplanned work as the real job of a technology leader, and The Unicorn Project did the same for developer experience. Accelerate, which he wrote with Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, gave me research to point at when someone asked why small batches and deployment pipelines deserve investment. When my team cut marketing request turnaround from nine days to three, the moves came from his books. Make the work visible, limit what’s in progress, shorten the path to done. The talks he’s gathered through the DevOps Enterprise Summit are a library I still raid.