Kyle Harrison
concept

Playbooks

Playbooks

“Playbooks” is the third leg of Kyle’s “process, people, and playbooks” frame for how tech gets built — the through-line of The Professionalization of Startups and its sequel Revisiting The Professionalization of Startups. The argument: a generation of operators spent years not just learning but inventing the playbooks and best-practices of modern company-building (PLG, GTM motions, the Figma approach), becoming “nodes within the collective knowledge base around building technology,” and that generation is now “coming into their own as managers and leaders.” Tools like purpose-built PLG CRMs exist precisely to “replicate the hard-won lessons of the past few years.” In The State of Startup Media, producing playbooks is held up as an example of generating new knowledge — “playbooks, open-source code, demo videos — rather than merely curating the old.”

But Kyle’s essays carry an explicit caution. In the “Playing the Playbook Game” retrospective, he notes that many companies now follow “fairly established playbooks,” which raises two questions: how much arbitrage is left in the known-knowns, and how exposed a well-known playbook becomes to manipulation. There is a spectrum “where playbooks can be transformative or manipulative” — as the game becomes well-understood, people start “playing on the weaknesses of the game itself.” His closing advice: “learn from the people, processes, and playbooks that have been explored. But don’t turn them into dogma.”

Within the wiki, “Playbooks” also functions as a hub for a family of domain-specific operating guides — Playbook: Sales, Playbook: Product, Playbook: Growth, Playbook: Marketing, Playbook: Operations, Playbook: Finance, Playbook: M&A, and others — alongside the broader operating concepts (Product, Sales, Growth, Management, M&A) they instantiate. The Quick Capture links below are sources Kyle saved while building out this topic.

Playbook aggregation (Roam project)

Kyle’s running plan for which operating playbooks to build out, prioritized. Open-source reference list of docs: almanac.io.

Skills — Priority 1

Skills — Priority 2

Vertical

Playbooks to review

Quick Capture links — June 29th, 2021

Quick Capture links — June 18, 2026

Links Kyle saved to this topic on June 18, 2026 (manual capture batch).

Quick Capture links — April 30th, 2020

Links Kyle saved to this topic in his April 30th, 2020 Roam “Quick Capture” log.

Where this appears

Saved references

  • How I Automated All of My Social Media — Pat Walls’ playbook for automating business social accounts. Saved April 17th, 2020.

Referenced in