Kaizen Isn’t a Poster on the Wall. It’s a Daily Pain in the Arse (and That’s the Point)

Why game teams stall on continuous improvement and what you can do about it.

Deep Dive by NotebookLM.

• Most retrospectives fail because they feel safe but avoid the real discomfort needed for actual, ongoing improvement.

• Real Kaizen isn’t a process or a workshop but a mindset of constant, often awkward, small changes embedded into everyday work.

• Producers must stop acting as note-takers and instead create a culture where the team owns and acts on improvement without waiting for permission.

Let’s be honest. Most retrospectives are about as effective as shouting into a void with post-its.

Sure, they start well. The team gathers round. Someone asks how the sprint went. Someone else cracks a joke about a bug. Everyone has a moment of shared eye-rolling. Then come the stickies. “We need more focus.” “Fewer meetings.” “Better comms with art.” All fair. All familiar. Then you vote, pick a couple, act on them, and move on.

Two weeks later? Same issues. Same vibes. A bit more fatigue. Maybe this time, someone’s brave enough to say what you’re all thinking: “Why do we even bother with this?”

And that’s the thing. Most retros aren’t retrospectives in the Kaizen sense. They’re soft rituals. Comfort theatre. They give the illusion of progress without making anyone truly uncomfortable. Which, of course, is the entire point of proper improvement. If no one’s squirming just a little, you’re not digging deep enough.

In mobile game teams, especially, where the pressure to release, optimise, monetise and retain is relentless, it’s easy to treat improvement as a nice-to-have. Fixes get postponed. Experiments get vetoed. Delivery becomes gospel. So, retros devolve into a checkbox exercise. “Did we do it?” Yes. “Did anything change?” Erm.

The deeper problem isn’t the team. It’s the unspoken agreement that retros are the only space where improvement lives. Everything else? Heads down. Ship the sprint. Survive the roadmap.

That’s not Kaizen. That’s cargo cult process wrapped in a thin Agile blanket.

Real improvement isn’t just a meeting. It’s the awkward conversation in the hallway. It’s a designer admitting they’re not proud of the UX because they were rushed. It’s someone quietly tweaking a template to save their future self from madness, and telling others about it.

Kaizen isn’t something you do. It’s how you think. And most teams, if they’re honest, haven’t made that leap.

Time to fix that.

Kaizen, Properly Understood

Let’s clear something up before this turns into another “how to run a better retro” piece. Kaizen isn’t a workshop. It’s not a cultural value buried on a Notion page. It’s not a word to drop in meetings to sound like you’ve read The Toyota Way.

It means “change for good”. But the kind of change it demands isn’t the comfy kind. It’s the uncomfortable, daily tension between what you’re doing and what you could be doing better. The Kaizen mindset says you never arrive. There’s no finish line. No moment where you say, “We nailed it.” Just daily progress. Or not.

It’s about spotting waste, friction and nonsense in your day-to-day and doing something about it, even if it’s small, especially if it’s small. Not once a quarter. Not after a meltdown. Every single week.

It doesn’t care how many retros you’ve run or whether you use Jira, Trello or a wall of scribbles. If your team shrugs off rework, accepts “the way things are”, or keeps dragging the same pain points from sprint to sprint, you’re not improving. You’re surviving.

And look, this isn’t a judgment. Most teams fall into this trap because they think improvement has to be Big and Strategic. But Kaizen isn’t dramatic. It’s not about running a workshop with coloured cards and snacks. It’s about choosing not to live with something that’s crap, just because it’s familiar.

If the backlog’s a mess, fix it. If people are getting blocked the same way every sprint, sort it. If handovers continue to cause confusion, change how you do them. And if you’ve raised the same issue three times and nothing’s changed, stop waiting for permission.

Kaizen isn’t for the agreeable. It’s for the persistent. And producers, more than anyone, are in the best position to set that tone.

This is where it starts.

Why Most Teams Fake It

Most teams are faking continuous improvement without even realising it.

They tick the boxes. They show up for the retro. They say the words. But if you zoom out and look at what’s changed over the past three months, it’s a rounding error, a few tweaks to a Notion document. Maybe someone added another column to the board. There’s noise, but not much signal.

The clever ones put on a convincing show. They have rituals, use all the right terms, and their updates sound like progress. But it’s mostly just Agile cosplay; the same old thinking wrapped in trendy tools.

The truth is, improvement has become performance art.

Why? Because meaningful change is inconvenient. It gets in the way of delivering. It forces hard conversations. It exposes gaps in skill, structure or decision-making that no one wants to look at. It’s much easier to patch things up with a polite nod and a Trello card than it is to rework how you collaborate with QA or challenge a dependency that shouldn’t exist.

And let’s not ignore the biggest blocker of all. Fear. Teams stay quiet because they’re afraid of being labelled difficult. Fearful of being told “that’s not your job.” Afraid that pointing out a broken process might somehow reflect poorly on them. So they filter. They soften. They water it down until it’s harmless.

Which is precisely how change dies.

You can run a retro every sprint and still be standing in the same mess twelve months later, wondering why velocity hasn’t improved and why your team feels quietly checked out.

This isn’t a team problem. It’s a system problem. And as the producer, that system is part of your remit, whether anyone says it out loud or not.

So here’s the uncomfortable bit. If your team is faking it, it’s probably because they think improvement isn’t expected. Or worse, they think it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to be the one who proves otherwise.

Not with slogans. Not with process. With action. With persistence. And with a visible refusal to let good enough stay good enough.

That’s when people start to follow.

You’re the Producer, Not the Note-Taker

If you’re running the retro and then handing out action items like free samples at a supermarket, congratulations. You’ve become the team’s admin assistant.

And look, it’s easy to fall into that role. Producers are natural organisers. We fill gaps, smooth edges, and keep the chaos at bay. When things wobble, we jump in. When someone says, “We should fix this,” we nod and put it on the backlog. But that habit, helpful as it seems, often shields the team from taking ownership of their mess.

You’re not here to fix everything. You’re here to build the conditions where the team starts fixing things themselves.

That means stepping back more than you’d like. Holding the silence when no one speaks up. Letting an awkward truth land without immediately softening it. It also means saying no when someone tries to punt an obvious issue into the future just because it’s “not the right time”.

You don’t have to be the change agent. You have to be the one who makes sure change can’t be avoided.

Start by embedding Kaizen into your everyday work, not just retrospectives. If something’s broken, don’t wait for the following sprint review to bring it up. Talk about it now. If a bug slipped because a handover was rushed, ask what needs to change in that moment, not three weeks later. Make those micro-adjustments part of how you all work, not some separate process improvement lane.

Be annoyingly consistent. Not loud. Not aggressive. Just always, quietly, pushing. Keep asking, “Is this better than last time?” And when it’s not, ask why that’s OK.

And don’t expect applause for any of this. You’ll probably get eye-rolls, especially at first. People don’t always like being nudged out of their groove. But if you’re the one who never lets improvement drop off the radar, it starts to stick.

The best producers aren’t the ones who run the best retros. They’re the ones who make retros unnecessary because the team has built a habit of fixing what’s broken the moment they spot it.

Your role isn’t to facilitate improvement. It’s to normalise it.

Practical Ways to Build Kaizen into a Game Team

Let’s get something clear right away. You don’t need a Notion workspace complete with templates or a quarterly “Kaizen initiative” with matching hoodies. You need to start acting like improvement is part of the job, not some extracurricular activity for when there’s nothing else going on.

Kaizen works best when it’s small, frequent, and embedded. Which means you need to stop saving it up for retros and start sprinkling it into your week.

Start with your standups. If someone mentions a blocker that sounds familiar, ask what has been done to prevent it from happening again. If the answer is “nothing” or “we just worked around it,” you’ve got a golden Kaizen moment. That’s a problem begging for prevention, not just another patch.

Try a “stop the line” culture. Not in the dramatic, everyone-hands-off-keyboards way. More like giving your team permission to say, “Hang on, this thing we’re doing feels daft. Can we pause and fix it properly?” Most teams wait until something is broken before speaking up. Encourage earlier nudges.

Make improvement visible. Create a small corner on your team board that says, “We made this change.” It could be a better handover process, a cleaner naming convention, or just killing off a pointless weekly sync. Doesn’t matter. If it made the team’s life easier or the game better, it goes up. Don’t wait for retros to celebrate progress. Show it, live.

And for the love of all that is playable, don’t bury Kaizen under “process work.” If you’re tagging every fix with three Jira labels and logging it in a Google Sheet no one reads, you’ve missed the point. Keep it light. If it takes more effort to record the improvement than to make it, you’ve built a blocker.

One last thing. Improvement doesn’t have to mean being clever. It can mean being lazy in the smartest possible way. If someone builds a tiny script that saves the design team two hours a week, that’s a win. If you agree as a squad to delete any ticket older than a month unless someone defends it passionately, that’s also a win. Kaizen is about shaving off friction until the day runs smoother without anyone having to push so hard.

You don’t need permission to start doing this. Just a bit of nerve and a willingness to say, “We can probably make this less annoying.”

And once your team gets a taste for that? You’re laughing.

Common Traps and How to Handle Them

Let’s not pretend good intentions are enough. Even with the best will in the world, Kaizen efforts often fall flat for predictable, repeatable reasons: the same problems, just in different studios.

The classic one is “that’s not my job.” Someone flags an issue. Everyone nods. Then nothing happens, because no one’s technically responsible. The UX flow is messy, but it’s not our responsibility. The build process is slow, but it’s not your pipeline. And so the problem lives on, quietly annoying everyone.

Fix this by making ownership explicit. Not a formal RACI-matrix level of explicitness. Just have someone raise their hand and say, “I’ll chase it.” If no one volunteers, you’ve just learnt something more valuable than what the problem is. You’ve learnt how much your team cares about fixing it.

Then there’s the hero producer trap. This one’s a slow burn. You spot all the issues, take them on yourself, and go into firefighting mode. Suddenly, you’re the process guru, Jira wrangler, team therapist and operations lead rolled into one. It feels useful, but it’s not sustainable, and worse, it teaches the team to wait for you to fix things. That’s not Kaizen. That’s a bottleneck.

Your job is not to carry the weight of improvement. Your job is to help the team build the muscle to have it themselves. That means biting your tongue sometimes and letting them stumble, rather than handing it over with a bow on top.

Then there’s the big one. The deadline excuse. “We don’t have time to fix this right now.” Sound familiar? Everyone agrees the problem exists, but the release is looming, and it gets bumped to “next sprint.” Again. And again. Until it either becomes permanent, or someone new joins and asks, “Why is this still like this?”

You can’t fix everything right away. But you can start by tracking how often improvement work gets bumped. Count it. If something has been postponed more than twice, have that uncomfortable chat. Ask if the cost of delay is worth it, and what message it sends.

And finally, let’s talk about managers who smile politely when you mention process change and then carry on exactly as before. That’s tricky. You can’t force buy-in, but you can surface consequences. If leadership keeps breaking sprint boundaries, show how that affects throughput. If priorities change daily, share the context-switching costs in terms of time, bugs, and morale. Keep it data-led, not emotional. Frame it as helping them get more of what they already want.

Not every trap can be avoided. But most can be spotted early and handled with a bit of backbone and a steady hand.

Don’t wait for permission. Just stop stepping over the same broken floorboard.

Kaizen Is Culture, Not a Template

You can run retrospectives like clockwork, track every action item, and still get stuck in the same old loop if your culture doesn’t support them. That’s the bit people don’t want to admit. The reason Kaizen efforts stall isn’t usually because the team doesn’t care or the tools are wrong. It’s because improvement isn’t part of how the place works.

Look at what gets praised. Look at what gets ignored. That’s your culture.

If someone quietly cleans up a horrible process and no one notices, they’ll stop bothering. If you throw a launch party for shipping on time but skip over the lessons learnt from the three-week crunch that got you there, the message is loud and clear. Delivery matters. Learning doesn’t.

Culture isn’t what you write in a slide deck. It’s what people pick up from the way things are done. If Kaizen is treated like an extracurricular activity, it’ll always fall behind the deadline. If people see that raising process issues gets you labelled as “negative” or “difficult,” they’ll stay quiet. If improvement only happens when you say it should, you’re managing permission, not culture.

So, how do you change it?

Start small. Celebrate change as it happens. Not just the big wins, but the quiet nudges. Someone removed a pointless sign-off? Mention it in standup. A team came up with their way to run reviews that cuts the faff? Steal it and share it. Let people see that change is a normal part of life. That it is expected. That it sticks.

Then stop being the only one who talks about it. Ask people what they’ve improved lately. Make it a casual, recurring question. Not to catch anyone out. To make the point that this is the kind of team where progress is part of the day job.

Drop the dramatic gestures. No one needs a two-hour improvement workshop with icebreakers and group hugs. They need to feel like fixing things is part of what it means to be in this team. That change doesn’t need a retro. It just needs someone to say, “Let’s do it better.”

That’s culture. And it starts with you showing what you’ll tolerate, what you’ll highlight, and what you’re quietly letting go.

Choose wisely.

It’s Supposed to Be Hard (That’s the Whole Point)

Improvement is not meant to be easy. If it feels effortless, you’re probably doing the safe bits. The cosmetic stuff. The parts that don’t ruffle any feathers or push anyone’s comfort zone.

Real Kaizen stings a little.

To improve, you have to admit that what you’ve got today isn’t good enough. That process you designed needs to change. That a system you rely on is slowing you down. That your way of working might be part of the problem. No one loves that feeling.

But that’s the work.

You don’t build a better team by avoiding discomfort. You make it by learning to sit with it and do something useful anyway. And if you’re the producer, you’re the one who has to go first. You’re the one who keeps asking the awkward questions, keeps pointing out the cracks, and keeps making space for change even when it would be easier to ship the sprint and move on.

There’s no tidy finish line. No perfect system. Kaizen isn’t about arriving. It’s about choosing, every week, to nudge things forward. Sometimes it will be a leap. Most weeks it’ll be a shuffle. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you never stop looking for the next thing worth fixing.

This isn’t a nice-to-have. In games, especially mobile, you are always behind something. Deadlines. Competitors. Market shifts. Player demands. If your team isn’t actively getting better, they’re slowly falling behind, even if everything feels fine.

So make Kaizen part of your identity, not your process. Don’t chase the fancy frameworks. Don’t wait for the perfect time. Just start doing the next small thing. And the one after that.

It’ll be messy. It’ll be awkward. And it’ll be worth it.

Because if your team learns to improve as part of how they work, not just when they’re told to, you’ve already won. Everything else becomes easier from there.