Playbook & workflows

A Playbook is a multi-step workflow with an owner, a schedule, and a goal. It is the way thola turns "good idea" into "thing that happens."

Most thola users don't build a Playbook from scratch. They accept one of the ~40 templates we ship, customise three fields, and turn it on. The remaining ones who do build from scratch tend to be at companies where one founder is so good at a thing that they want it codified for the rest of the team.

What a Playbook is

In structure:

Playbook = trigger + steps + owner(s) + closure

• Trigger — what starts the Playbook. A flag, a schedule, a chat command, or a metric crossing a threshold.
• Steps — an ordered list. Each step is either an agent action (draft email, calculate, send), a form (collect input), a task (assign to a human), or a wait (24 hours, until the next morning, etc.).
• Owner(s) — who's responsible for the run. Can be a single person or a role (e.g. "the Sales lead, whoever that is").
• Closure — a check that the goal was achieved. If not, the Playbook stays open and the Planner asks why.

How a Playbook runs

When a Playbook is triggered, thola opens a run of it. A run has:

• A unique ID
• A status (running, blocked, completed, abandoned)
• A timeline of steps with timestamps
• A linked chat where you can talk to the Planner about the run

You watch a run from Playbook → Runs, or directly from chat ("show me the current cost-reduction Playbook run").

A real example

The Stuck Deal Unblock Playbook is one of the most-run templates. It is triggered when a Sales flag for "Deals stuck in Negotiation > 14 days" fires. The steps:

1. List the stuck deals — the Sales agent pulls them with last-activity dates.
2. Categorise — for each deal, the agent guesses why it's stuck: price, legal, competitor, internal sponsor lost, unknown.
3. Draft a re-engagement message — one per deal, in the right tone for the categorisation.
4. Owner reviews — the assigned Sales rep reviews each draft and edits.
5. Send — confirmed messages go out via the channel of record (email, WhatsApp, or just a task to call).
6. Wait 7 days — the run pauses, scheduled to resume.
7. Check responses — Sales agent compares pipeline status; any deal that moved is removed from the stuck list.
8. Close — if pipeline moved on > 60% of deals, the run is considered successful. If not, the Playbook recommends a different intervention.

This is 8 steps. They take about 30 minutes total of human time. Without the Playbook, this would take hours of "let me find the deals" + "let me write the messages" + "did I follow up?"

Triggers in detail

A Playbook can be triggered by any of:

Schedules use cron-like syntax under the hood; the UI is plain language ("first of every month at 9 AM").

Steps in detail

Every step has a type. The set:

Steps can have conditions — "only run this step if revenue dropped > 5%". Conditions let you reuse a Playbook across slightly different cases.

Owners and roles

A Playbook step can be assigned to:

• A specific person (Priya)
• A role (the Sales lead)
• The flag owner (the person who owns the triggering flag)
• The previous step's owner (chaining)

We recommend roles over specific people. People leave; roles stay. If the Sales lead changes, the Playbook still works.

Visibility

Every Playbook run is visible to:

• The owner(s) on the run
• Anyone with playbook:read permission

The run timeline is the audit trail. Every step records who did what, when. This is especially important for compliance-adjacent Playbooks (vendor approvals, customer offboarding, payroll specials).

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