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Ask HN: Does anybody use “playbooks” at work? When, and how?

3 points by adamhp ↗ HN
I hear this term a lot. "Playbooks". "Systems". Even, "Operating System". And I hear about people creating them and using them with much success in their business. I've never really used one, and I'm not even sure how they're being used. I realize I'm at risk of sounding really silly here, but they sound like great tools that I'm not taking advantage and I'm not sure how.

I've used SOPs in operations before. Checklists and requirements and "thou shalt do X" and what not. But I've never been "wowed" by a system or really seen its benefit firsthand.

As an engineer, I understand the benefit of having a system you can iterate on and improve over time, but how are people actually implementing these in their business?

I know this is a vague question, here are a few concrete ones:

- Are you currently using playbooks? - When? - How? - For what purpose? - Have you ever created one for your company?

6 comments

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mikece
Where I work the developer on-call covers more than just their team's work so we make use of Playbooks (though we call them "Run books"). A scenario might be: "If service X throws an error of the type Y, then re-deploy service Z." When services X and Z belong to another team and members of my team have no reason to understand those services and errors that intimately, then having the Run books/playbook means I'm not waking up someone on another team at 3:33 AM.
adamhp
What's the format? A wiki, or document or something?
mikece
Markdown documents in a Git repo.
paulcole
We use EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) where I work. We were pretty good at our core business, but really bad at setting goals, planning, making decisions, etc. EOS gives us a framework to do that so we can focus on what we're actually good it.

This book is a good intro:

https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business-ebook...

adamhp
This is great, thank you! I actually have read Traction and have the EOS bookmarked. Appreciate the extra validation.
nicbou
Those usually end up either as scripts or pipelines.