Sprint Theme Plus Kaizen
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
A sprint-planning structure Partaker proposes to fix the problem of every department inventing its own quest in isolation. Each sprint gets one overall theme, derived from the one-area focus question, that names what matters most to the company right now. Every team or department then plans against two lenses: what can we do in service of the theme, and what should we do for the continuous improvement of our own business function. The connector is 'and/or', not 'or' — a team can contribute to both, one, or in the case of functions like finance, mostly the second. This guarantees every group always has something of significance without forcing artificial contributions to a theme they cannot serve. Partaker's analogy is the body sprinting: legs and lungs are directly involved, but the eyes still need to stay on.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Derive the sprint theme
At the start of each sprint, run the one-area focus question against the annual goal to produce a single overall theme for the cycle. It should be one main thing, though it may have a few components.
Watch out A theme with several unrelated main things is not a theme — it reproduces the overwhelm the structure is meant to remove.
- 2
Have each team apply lens one — service of the theme
Each team, department or individual asks what they can do this sprint that directly advances the theme. Some sprints they will have something; some sprints they will not, and that is acceptable.
Pro tip Sales and marketing typically map directly to growth-oriented themes, so start there.
- 3
Have each team apply lens two — continuous improvement
Independently, each team asks what they should do this sprint that continuously improves their own business function, in the kaizen sense. Finance may have nothing tied to the theme but still needs to upgrade accounting software or install a new invoicing system.
- 4
Join the two lenses with and/or
Teams may contribute to the theme, improve their function, or do both. The point is that every group is either directly serving what matters most or compounding its own capability — never idle and never inventing busywork.
Watch out Treating the lenses as mutually exclusive collapses the model back into per-department quest-picking.
- 5
Route all incoming ideas through the sprint container
Every idea captured between sprints enters the cycle here rather than being actioned on arrival. The sprint is a container with finite capacity; work is distributed across containers.
Pro tip With five-to-six-week sprints, the longest anyone waits to have an idea considered is one cycle.
- 6
Review at sprint end against the annual goal
At the end of each sprint, review what went well and what did not, look at continuity goals from the current sprint, and look at the full idea repository — then consider both groupings together in service of where the company is trying to get to over the next year.
Pro tip Looking at completed work and pending ideas side by side is what produces the next theme.
In the wild
Ali's team ran a system where every team member set a personal quest each sprint — a project to move the needle in their own area. The accelerator customer success person picked an accelerator quest, the ops person an ops quest, the marketing person a marketing quest. Nobody was asking what the one, two or three things the company needed most were. Partaker's fix was to set the theme first at company level, then have each group ask the two-lens question against it, noting that some people would be delighted to have no quest and simply do their job.
→ Ali concluded the structure 'would solve a lot of problems' — contribution to the theme or improvement of your own area, with no forced quest.
Ali flagged around 300 customer support emails a week as suspicious. Partaker framed it as sprint-shaped work rather than a metrics debate: set an X-to-Y target of reducing weekly inquiries from 300 to 50, state the hypothesis that this is good for the business, then work the how — categorise the inquiry types, check them against the FAQ, assess whether the self-serve is good enough, and consider an AI chatbot to absorb a large share.
→ A vague anomaly became a themed sprint objective with a measurable target and a concrete investigation path.
Common mistakes
Letting departments set quests in isolation
When each function picks its own needle-moving project, the aggregate is a lot of motion with no company-level priority. Ali described exactly this outcome: everyone thinking about their own area's quest rather than the two or three things the company actually needed in the next six weeks.
Forcing every team onto the theme
Some functions are critical but rarely map to the sprint theme. Partaker's finance example makes the point: demanding a theme-linked deliverable from them produces contrived work, when an accounting-software upgrade is the genuinely valuable move.
Treating incoming ideas as emergencies
Acting immediately on every post-event idea bypasses the container entirely. Partaker allowed a genuine exception — if not implementing now means the company implodes — but noted it is very rarely an emergency situation.
From the transcript
“every Sprint should use that question you know if everything were stay the same whereas the one area where change would have the greatest impact…”
“they're either directly contributing to that which is most important in the Sprint and or continuously improving from a kais point of view right their…”
“every Sprint is a container and all it is is a bucket of activities that need to be distributed across you know the containers”
From the episode
A Brutally Honest Conversation With My CEO Coach - Eric Partaker
Eric Partaker