What is a Playbook?

A Playbook on YAMO is a way of working written down as a document that software can follow. It says what the work produces, the numbered steps it goes through, which tools those steps are allowed to call, which of your own documents they read, and the rules they must never break. It is written in plain markdown, so you can read the whole thing top to bottom and know exactly what will happen when it runs.

That is the whole idea: if you can write down how the work is done, YAMO can do it, the same way, every time.

What a Playbook contains

A Playbook is one folder of readable files rather than a diagram or a flowchart.

• A goal. What one run of this delivers, stated as an outcome rather than an activity.
• A persona and a set of rules. Who the work should read as coming from, and the absolutes it must respect. Both apply to every step.
• Ordered Plays. The numbered steps. Each one is its own small document.
• An input contract. What the Playbook asks for each time it runs, and what you set once as its owner.
• Connectors. The tools it needs, declared by name.
• Reference files. Your own documents that the steps read while they work.

What a Playbook deliberately does not contain is anybody's data. No customer's answers, no uploaded files, no run history, and no price. Those all belong somewhere else, which is what makes one Playbook usable by many people at once without their work touching.

Playbook, or Service?

This is the distinction people trip over, so it is worth being blunt about.

A Playbook and a Service are not two things you own side by side. They are one thing at two stages. The Playbook is the definition stage: what you write. The Service is the same object once it can be consumed: what it costs, who can see it, what a buyer is shown. Creating a Playbook creates its Service, in a draft stage that nobody can run yet, not even you.

So "the Playbook" is the right word when you mean the method, and "the Service" is the right word when you mean the thing someone runs.

A real one

URL SEO Audit is a template in the Playbook Library and it is about as small as a Playbook gets. Its goal is a prioritised SEO audit of one page. It asks for one thing each run, the URL. It declares no Connectors, so it works on a brand new account. It reads one reference file, target-keywords.md, which is where you say what the page should rank for. And it runs as two Plays: research the page, then write the audit.

Two steps, one input, one reference file. That is a complete Playbook.

What to read next

• What is a Play? for the steps inside it.
• Playbook for the one-sentence version.
• Build for how one gets made.