About

Operations is where most companies now decide what agents do, and almost nobody writes it down. The best operators we know learned their methods by trial, in private, one bad week at a time. Playbook is where they show their work: the rules they wrote, the tools they kept, and the calls they still make by hand.

We write for the people who run the business: chief operating officers, heads of operations, controllers, support and payments leads, and the operations engineers who build their systems. If you have ever rewritten a process at 11 p.m. because an agent did exactly what you told it, this is for you.

Operators

Each conversation starts with a long sit-down and a day spent with the team. We watch the queue, read the rules, and ask the operator to explain the decisions nobody else sees. The result is a short profile of how one team actually runs, in their own words, with their names on it.

We publish one conversation every two weeks. Each operator gets to point readers at whatever they want: open roles, a new product, or a problem they want help with.

Playbooks

A playbook is a working guide to one function, such as bookkeeping, support, or procurement. We write each one with the operators who do that work every day. It covers how the work runs with agents now, the framework they use to decide what to hand off, the tools they rank, and the judgment calls that stay with a person.

Playbooks change as the work changes. Each one carries the date it was last updated and the names of everyone who shaped it, and we revise it when a contributor tells us a rule stopped working.

Events

After each conversation, we host a dinner for 15 with the operator. A third of the seats go to the operator’s own peers, a third to operators we invite, and a third to people who write to us. Everyone at the table runs operations at a company of their own, so the conversation stays specific.

There are no panels and no slides. The operator opens with one idea from their conversation, and then the table trades notes on the rules they wrote after their own worst weeks.

Take part

Nominate an operator whose team we should spend a day with, including your own. Offer to contribute to a playbook in your function. Or ask for a seat at the next dinner. We read every note.

Who makes it

Playbook is published by Runner, which builds agent fleets for operations teams. Runner’s co-founders, Yitong Zhang and Charlie Feng, edit it. Runner pays for the dinners and the photography. Operators are never paid to appear, and appearing never requires using Runner.