What is a playbook?
Also called: operational playbook, response playbook
Last updated
A playbook sets out how a team responds to a type of situation, such as a security incident, a major customer complaint or a new market launch. It describes the goals, roles, decision points and communication, and points to the detailed procedures, such as runbooks and SOPs, that people follow for each part.
In more detail
Playbooks sit above runbooks. A runbook gives the exact steps for one task, like restoring a database. A playbook covers the whole response: who leads, how severity is decided, who is told and when, which runbooks to use, and when the situation is over.
The word comes from sport, and the idea is similar: plays agreed in advance, so the team does not have to invent its approach under pressure. Security teams, customer success teams and sales teams all use them.
Example
A phishing response playbook says the security lead decides severity, then sets out what happens at each level: which runbook to follow to reset accounts and block the sender, when to tell the leadership team and the regulator, and how to close the incident with a review.
Playbooks in CheckFlow
In CheckFlow a playbook can run as a checklist that records the decisions and starts the detailed procedures: a severity drop-down shows the steps for that level through conditional logic, and a Linked Checklist field starts the right runbook as its own checklist.
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