Customer Obsessed Engineering

Customer Obsessed Engineering

When to go waterfall

If you're working in a multi-modal organization you'll find this helpful: the canonical waterfall / agile decision tree.

Zac Beckman
Mar 24, 2026
∙ Paid
Photo by Marcus Dall Col on Unsplash

I was recently asked to critique a new decision tree that helps teams decide between waterfall and agile when starting a new project. The intended outcome is to improve long-term results in the organization by giving teams the ability to make critical decisions quickly and accurately.

Overall, “good shift-left stuff” in my book. Anyhow, here’s the diagram I was asked to comment on:

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