Assess your team against the Five Ideals of DevOps
Inspired by Gene Kim's bestselling novel The Unicorn Project, the Five Ideals offer a powerful lens for examining how your team builds, ships, and improves software. Use this check to surface where developers feel blocked by complexity, where daily work could be made easier, and whether psychological safety and customer focus are guiding your DevOps practices. Honest conversation across these five ideals helps teams remove friction, restore flow, and reconnect technical work to the value it delivers.
Dimensions
The Five Ideals
The five guiding principles from The Unicorn Project that shape high-performing DevOps cultures.
Local and Simple
We can make local code changes in a simple way without impacting others.
- Strongly disagree
- Neutral
- Strongly agree
Focus and Flow
Our work environment is engaging and even joyful. We have small batching, single piece flow with continual feedback.
- Strongly disagree
- Neutral
- Strongly agree
Improvement of Daily Work
We have limited technical debt and our architecture lets us work efficiently, deliver value faster, and benefit the business.
- Strongly disagree
- Neutral
- Strongly agree
Psychological Safety
Our team members feel safe to talk about problems openly and to address issues without fear.
- Strongly disagree
- Neutral
- Strongly agree
Customer Focus
We value the context (systems that deliver the core product) to the customer as essential and resource them appropriately, but also understand the core (what customers are willing and able to pay for).
- Strongly disagree
- Neutral
- Strongly agree
When to use this health check
- When your team wants to assess its DevOps culture against the Five Ideals from The Unicorn Project.
- During a retrospective or quarterly review to surface friction in how work flows from idea to customer.
- When onboarding teams to DevOps ways of working and you need a shared baseline.
- When technical debt, slow delivery, or low morale suggest deeper systemic issues worth exploring.
Tips & tricks
- Share Gene Kim's Five Ideals with the team beforehand so everyone rates from a common understanding.
- Encourage candid responses — the Psychological Safety dimension is only meaningful if people feel safe answering it honestly.
- Compare results over time to see whether improvements to daily work are actually reducing friction.
- Pair low scores with a discussion of concrete experiments the team can run before the next check.