The Phoenix Project in Orbit: Kessler Seven
At 04:17 station time, the first chunk strikes. A mining accident at Kessler Seven has shattered an asteroid, and thousands of debris fragments are hurtling toward the Meridian space station. Ten thousand people live on board. The only defense is interceptor probes, built and deployed by the thousands. So far, there are just four hundred; eight thousand are needed. The program isn’t being stifled by technical challenges. It’s being stifled by handoffs, approval processes, and good intentions.
Yuki Tanaka is supposed to save the day. She’s a propulsion engineer and never wanted to be in charge of anything. Now the station is counting on her. To build the probes faster, she must first fix the way the program operates. She has to find the bottlenecks, count the hand-offs, and take on the people who think they’re protecting the system by slowing it down.
That’s the plot of „Kessler Seven,“ a novel I published this summer. It translates the principles of Product Velocity into a space disaster. Anyone familiar with the approach from real-world practice will recognize every character here.
The ebook is available for free download or in the Kindle Store.
„We're keeping ten thousand people from being shredded by gravel moving at four kilometers per second.“
Kessler Seven, Chapter 16: Business and Intent
In the tradition of the didactic novel
The instructional novel has a brief but distinct tradition in our industry. In 1984, Eliyahu Goldratt explained the Theory of Constraints not as a technical book, but as a novel about a plant manager who saves his factory from closure. Gene Kim adapted this format to the IT industry in 2013 and wrote *„The Phoenix Project“The definitive work of the DevOps movement. A failed software migration, an overwhelmed hero, a cryptic mentor, and, in the end, a new understanding of flow.”.
„Kessler Seven“ follows this tradition. Instead of a factory or data center, the setting is a space station, and instead of Lean or DevOps, the novel incorporates "Product Velocity" into the plot. The Velocity Loop appears as a diagram drawn by the mentor Amara in Chapter Six. Business, System Stewardship, Engineering, and Delivery aren’t just boxes on a chart—they’re people working at cross-purposes until the circle closes. The bottleneck is an exhausted colleague named Marcus. The approval stage that’s holding everything up has a face. Anyone who applies Product Velocity will read this fiction as a case study in oxygen deprivation.
How the Book Came to Be
I wrote the novel primarily using Claude Opus. To be more precise, the AI wrote, and I curated and edited. While working on the project, the model had access to the complete manuscript of my upcoming book on Product Velocity. This ensured that the concepts in the novel remained consistent with the methodology from which they originated.
My role thus shifted from author to editor. I laid out the structure, fleshed out the characters, and checked to make sure the technical terms were accurate. For an audience that debates the sensible use of AI on a daily basis, the book is also an experiment. How far can generated prose go when a technical manuscript sets the framework? The source is clearly stated in the colophon.
Yuki blinked. Reyes didn't let her finish. „So: Earth replied.“
Kessler Seven, Chapter 13: Audit
„Regarding the evacuation request?“
„Regarding the standby protocol. It’s not a ’no.‘ It’s worse than that.“
Get the book
„Kessler Seven“ is available for free download as an EPUB. If you prefer to read in your usual environment, you can find the title for €2.99 in the Kindle Store. The price doesn’t buy you any additional content—just convenience: automatic delivery to your device, synchronization of your reading position, and the familiar reading environment. Both versions contain the same text and the same afterword, in which I explain the method behind the plot.
Tell a friend
If you like the novel, the best thing you can do is spread the word. A „teaching novel“ thrives on being passed around the team, just as *The Phoenix Project* demonstrated. Colleagues who struggle with slow approvals and botched handoffs will recognize themselves in Meridian.
The methodology behind the story is freely available. At productvelocity.org/de/resources Here you'll find free resources on the Velocity Loop and the four practices, as well as the newsletter for anyone who wants to follow updates on my upcoming book.
