Sooner or Later: Deliver Early or Minimize Waste

There’s an obvious but important tension in Lean/Agile development around when to make decisions. Between the fundamental Agile position that we should do the most important and most risky work first, and the Lean argument that we should make decisions at the last possible moment. We need to decide early and try things out, iterate to minimize risk and time to market; but we should put off decisions and avoid iterating to keep costs down.