No, the philosophies are completely orthogonal. “Lean” might be a shared buzzword, but the meaning is completely different in manufacturing vs software. Toyota

No, the philosophies are completely orthogonal. “Lean” might be a shared buzzword, but the meaning is completely different in manufacturing vs software. Toyota Production System, just-in-time manufacturing, and such are about making a running process more efficient and lean over time, but agile software is about being flexible as you develop something brand new, and Japanese companies are still terrible at it. They love waterfall, huge spreadsheets, and explicitly defining absolutely everything up front, often years in advance. None of this is incompatible with the other version of “lean” in manufacturing. * Many (most?) say they do “agile” software now, but that just means breaking the massive waterfall spreadsheet into predefined two week “sprints.”