Ok, I believe all analogies break down at some point. After all, comparing software development to cooking a meal might seem like a stretch—one involves lines of code, and the other involves ingredients, heat, and seasoning (and, more importantly, has more predictable properties than a software system). But with Thanksgiving coming up this week, I couldn’t help but see a connection between the two.
Cooking a meal for guests feels like an appropriate (though imperfect) analogy for the challenges we face with agile development, particularly when it comes to delivering something your customers truly enjoy. Worst case, I make you a little hungry.
Think about it: cooking and software development both involve balancing planning with improvisation, embracing feedback, and adapting to the unexpected. In both cases, you can plan endlessly, describe the ingredients in detail, and present a picture-perfect vision of the outcome, but at the end of the day, neither a dish nor a software product can be validated until it's experienced (meaning all of the components/ingredients are integrated).
Imagine you're hosting a dinner party, crafting a dish that your guests will adore. You meticulously plan the meal, sharing recipes, showing them pictures of the ingredients, and describing the flavors they’ll experience. You even present various ways it could be plated. But no matter how detailed your explanations, your guests can’t say with absolute certainty that they’ll enjoy the meal until they taste it.
So, is cooking a meal for Thanksgiving guests radically different from building technology features for users? Maybe not as much as you’d think.
This is the challenge we face in software development: creating a product that our customers will love, without them truly knowing if it meets their needs until they experience it. Let’s explore how this culinary metaphor aligns with agile principles and why embracing uncertainty is essential for delivering value.
Planning vs. Tasting
In cooking, we know what ingredients like salt, paprika, or peppers taste like individually. Similarly, in software, customers know the features they may want and the problems that need to be solved. But just as no two meals are exactly alike, the way ingredients come together in a dish—or features come together in software—is unique.
You can show designs, just like you can show a menu, but neither guarantees satisfaction. The only true way to know if the dish (or product) works is to taste it (or use it in a real-world process). Empiricism is how Scrum teams describe the real feedback (real data to make the next decision). This uncertainty is unavoidable, especially at scale, where diverse variables—from user preferences to team dynamics—make it impossible to predict every outcome.
Agile development thrives in this space, allowing for iteration and learning as we go. Most of the time, however, our stakeholders or customers may not be used to planning the expensive delivery of a project that way. They are used to the phased approach, so metaphors help them overcome the fallacy of phased planning (doing all the planning up front). In fact, I am writing this blog in response to our discussions in my latest Certified ScrumMaster® Workshop. As coaches to the organizations, we rely on conveying analogies that our stakeholders can understand.
Cooking the Dish vs. Over-Planning
The most expensive way to validate a meal is to cook it entirely, only to find it’s not what your guests want. Similarly, building software with no interim feedback risks wasting time and resources. Overplanning can lead to "analysis paralysis," where teams spend too much time predicting outcomes instead of testing assumptions. I worked with a team that over-planned for months, only to discover during user testing that key workflows were misunderstood. The customer validated at every step that we had what they wanted, but until they actually used the software in their process, they couldn't put their finger on why it wasn't working correctly. They forgot some critical steps in their workflow that didn't make it on the "requirements".
Consequently, I worked with a team that used agile principles, releasing a small, usable feature early for feedback, saving time and money. This not only helped our engineers validate their assumptions on how the software performs in a near-production environment but also let the user experience the software to provide critical steps they might have missed or not even thought of while we interviewed them for the "requirements". Words are imprecise and even if you get the words right, they can be interpreted differently by various team members. Take this graphic for instance, is the guy wrong?
Embracing the Latest Responsible Moment
Agile encourages decision-making at the latest responsible moment—the point at which further delay would lead to negative consequences. This concept is often misunderstood as procrastination, but the two are fundamentally different.
Our goal is to minimize risk by keeping options open as long as possible, enabling teams to respond to changing information. Typically an intentional delay that comes with avoidable consequences describes procrastination. Every personality and team dynamic influences this balance. Some people perform better under pressure, but agile ensures that decisions under pressure are made responsibly, not reactively (as much as we can avoid it).
Iteration and Feedback (Recipe for Success)
Much like tasting as you cook, agile relies on iterative development and frequent feedback loops to ensure alignment with customer needs. Instead of serving the entire meal at once, agile suggests starting with small, manageable portions that allow us to learn and improve before fully committing. For my Thanksgiving Dinner preparation, the analogy falls short because I would not serve a potato with a turkey and dressing slice to ask "Do you like this?" (and if so, continue cooking the rest of the meal, but in software, that's precisely what we want). I might do that if I wanted to test it with a larger group.
Small Bites, Big Wins: Delivering increments of value lets customers "taste" the product and provide feedback early, reducing the risk of spending time and resources on features that don’t meet their needs. The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can be in play here. Think of it as the appetizer—a simplified version of the dish that gives customers just enough to understand its flavor and value. By presenting an MVP, teams can test assumptions and validate ideas quickly without wasting time on unnecessary details. Instead of building an entire restaurant, start with one dish and a food truck. Gather feedback, refine the recipe, and only then expand to a full menu.
Adapting the Recipe: Feedback from the MVP phase helps refine the product, just like tasting and adjusting the seasoning in a dish. Each iteration brings us closer to the perfect flavor—an end product that customers love and use effectively. Just as developers can sample each iteration of their design and test, the chef can do the same thing, tasting as they prepare before providing it for acceptance. Agile's constant engagement ensures that the outcome meets real needs, not just imagined ones. By involving users throughout the process, we make them co-creators in shaping the dish—or product—ensuring satisfaction with the final result.
Scaling the Kitchen
Cooking for a small group is manageable, but scaling to a banquet introduces complexity—more cooks, diverse preferences, and tighter timelines. Agile practices help teams collaborate effectively, avoiding waste while maintaining quality.
A successful case of scaling with one of my clients involved using small autonomous teams focused on specific features, supported by structures for cross-team knowledge sharing and alignment. They reduced dependencies by rotating highly skilled experts across teams and holding regular planning sessions to identify and address roadblocks early. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) ensured alignment with company goals while empowering teams to innovate independently. Iterative development with continuous feedback allowed faster delivery of user-centered features, fostering collaboration and reducing bottlenecks. While it's not easy to do and is likely harder on the team members, the customer is in much better shape. Too often we optimize for the individuals on the team trying to raise their utilization and efficiency instead of looking at the cycle time as a whole from the customer's viewpoint. Just like a relay race, instead of watching the speed and agility of each runner, follow the baton.
Serve the Dish, Not Just the Idea
Agile development is like cooking for discerning guests: we can plan extensively, but until the product is "tasted," we won’t truly know if we’ve met expectations. By embracing the latest responsible moment, iterating, and gathering feedback, agile ensures we’re always adapting the recipe to create a dish—or product—customers will savor. If you are a fan of the "Agile is Dead" movement, the concepts are still very much alive, just pick a word that better resonates with you and your teams.
Let’s stop over-planning and start optimizing ourselves for the delivery of outcome, not output. After all, the best meals—and products—are those shaped by collaboration, creativity, and continuous improvement.
Join us at one of our upcoming public workshops and learn more of these concepts from Lance.