Free playbook · No credit card
Plan a sprint with AI in 5 minutes
The prompts, rituals, and templates we use to turn meeting noise into a shipped sprint — without a Monday status meeting that runs past lunch. Yours free.
- The 4 stages of AI-augmented sprint planning
- A relative priority distribution that ends the "everything is P1" trap
- Skill-based assignment heuristics (with a growth-slot rule)
- 3 ready-to-paste prompts: capture, triage, assign
- Mid-sprint adaptation signals — when to re-plan, when to keep going
- The 4 pitfalls that kill AI sprint pilots
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Read it in 10 minutes. Apply it this week.
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5 min
Median sprint plan time on Aligned
4 stages
A pipeline you can adopt this week
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A taste of what is inside
Real prompts. Real rituals. No fluff.
Two of the nine sections, redacted just enough to keep the opt-in honest.
Stage 2 · The triage prompt
One prompt. Every loose backlog item, ranked.
Paste this at the start of planning. It forces a relative ranking and a one-line rationale for every item.
You receive a list of {{N}} backlog items.
Assign each to a RELATIVE bucket:
Highest (top 10%), High (next 25%),
Medium (40%), Low (20%), Lowest (5%).
Do not exceed the count for any bucket. If a
call is forced, prefer the option that reduces
blast radius if the item slips...The full playbook includes the capture and assignment prompts.
Stage 2 · Priority distribution
Ends the “everything is P1” trap.
A relative-priority budget. If the math does not add up, the sprint does not start.
- Highest (top 10%)
- 10%
- High (next 25%)
- 25%
- Medium (middle 40%)
- 40%
- Low (next 20%)
- 20%
- Lowest (bottom 5%)
- 5%
The playbook explains how to derive these for your team.
From teams running it
The prompts work. So does the meeting math.
“Honestly the priority-distribution rule alone changed how we run planning. Stopped arguing about P1 vs P2 and just shipped.”
Engineering lead
Series A SaaS team · 8 engineers
“The triage prompt is doing 80% of the work my Monday morning used to. Cut my sprint planning meeting from 90 minutes to 25.”
Product lead
Mid-stage fintech · 14 engineers
Built by the team behind Aligned
Jonathan Hawkins
Founder, Aligned · Former Lead Level Designer, God of War
Twenty years shipping creative software with teams that lost hours to tool overhead. This playbook is the system we wired into Aligned — pulled out so any team can run it, with or without us.
Frequently asked
Quick answers
- What format is the playbook?
- A web page you can read in about 10 minutes, plus a clean downloadable PDF — the link is in your email, or hit Download PDF on the playbook itself. No DRM. Forward it to your whole team.
- Do I need Aligned Tools to use it?
- No. The prompts and rituals work with any LLM. Aligned just automates the parts that get tedious if you do them by hand.
- Will you spam me?
- No. After the playbook email you will get a short follow-up in a day or two with the one tactic teams adopt first. Unsubscribe in one click.
- Can I share it with my team?
- Yes, please. Forward the email or the playbook link. We track aggregate opt-ins, never individual reading behavior.
Stop running sprints your team will forget.
Grab the playbook now. Apply the first ritual at your next planning meeting.
Free to start · No credit card · 10-min read