Agile, like Lean, is more of a culture than a process. Agile is defined by 4 values and 12 principles, telling what the 17 authors of the manifesto have discovered to be important when it comes to effective software development. In short, you could say it's about getting fast feedback and being technically and mentally prepared for changing direction. Some describe this in a negative tone as "you never know what you will get". We would say that it's more correct to say that we never know from the beginning what the user or customer needs so we have to use a process that makes it possible to learn and adjust along the way. Agile is a way of minimizing risk, the risk that the customers do no longer want what we originally thought they wanted.

When talking about risk handling, the risk of delivering the wrong product or feature is one of the more important. When starting a project, we can guess what the customers need, but it's only when the customer starts using the output of the project that we know for sure if we delivered a high value product or not. To make it even more complicated, the right product could quickly become the wrong one when time passes since customers' needs and expectations change quickly. To minimize the risk of building the wrong things, Lean and Agile values quick feedback by getting features in a testable or sellable state as quick as possible. Lean and Agile values small releases often instead of big bang releases. They do also suggest that you optimize on flow instead of resources.