Begin with high-risk items #

When dealing with unknown problems, it is useful to identify the high-risk tasks and work on them first. Usually, that is where most of the value lies. This avoids our tendency to pick up the tasks we are comfortable with first which generate very little value. Moreover, this is critical to avoid bikeshedding early in the process.

Practically, this is achieved by breaking down the problem into various tasks and focusing on those that generate unique value. There may be many dependencies and this is where our judgement should kick in. We should focus on just doing enough of those tasks so that we quickly get to the ones that we care about. Think of it as an MVP. Once we build what we want to build or solve the problem, proceed with the hardening of all the previous work.