Writing the steps

The steps are where the work actually gets described. A Playbook is an ordered list of them, and running the Playbook means running them in order, each one handing its result to the next.

What a step declares

Every step is its own small document with a fixed set of fields at the top and free instructions below.

• Its position and its name. Which numbered stage it is, and what it is called.
• What it takes and what it gives. The input it expects to be handed, and the output it promises. The chain is these two lines lining up.
• The tools it may call. Its Connectors. A step with none calls none, and that is the normal case.
• The reference files it reads.
• Whether it pauses. A step can declare a human approval gate. See Approvals.

Below that is the instruction: what this step does, in plain words, written for somebody who has to follow it exactly.

The Playbook's persona and rules bind every step

Two things sit in the Playbook rather than in a step and apply to all of them: the persona the work reads as, and the rules it must never break. The Sales Email Drafter template has a rule reading "Prices exactly as offer.md states them". Written once, enforced on every stage, every run.

That is why a rule is worth more than an instruction. An instruction lives in one step; a rule binds the whole method.

Writing and changing them

A step's instructions are changed through YAMO rather than typed over directly. Select a passage and ask for it to be rewritten, or ask for the whole step, and you are shown the proposed change before it is applied. Attaching a tool or a reference file to a step is direct, and doing so also adds it to the Playbook's own list, so the Playbook can never declare less than its steps reach for.

Two things are worth knowing before you plan around them. Steps cannot be reordered or deleted once written. And after a Playbook has its first step, adding another happens by asking YAMO in the build chat rather than through a button; the direct add controls are shown on a Playbook that has no steps yet.

A real one

URL SEO Audit is two steps. audit-page researches how the page presents in search; draft-audit turns those notes into the prioritised report. Neither calls a tool. That is the whole method.