Runbooks

Runbook: write a piece

The steps for writing a post, page, email or offer that a person outside your team will read, in order.

What it can see: only this page and the two skills it names.

Source on GitHub.

The runbook itself

The steps for writing a post, page, email or offer that a person outside your team will read, in order.

1. Before writing

1. Check what you already know. Search your notes and earlier pieces on the topic before you write a word.
2. Purpose. Use the why-this-piece skill. Write what the piece demonstrates, whose standing it raises and its business goal. Name its kind: craft showpiece, customer post or research.
3. Reader and stake. Name the one reader and what they stand to gain or lose, in their currency. If the reader is you or your own tools, stop: a piece written for them has no one to land with.
4. Payload. Write the one thing the reader leaves able to do or know.
5. Collect failure cases. Keep a list of the ways earlier pieces failed, and reread it before you draft.

2. Drafting

1. Title. Write several, pick the one that names the reader's stake, and write out the base of any number in it ("40% of 25 shops", not "40%").
2. First screen. The stake, then a trusted name's own words, then your data under them. Pay the title's question here.
3. Body. Open several questions early and keep them open until the end. Join beats with "but" and "therefore" (the but-therefore skill), never "and then". Each section serves a decision the reader makes there.
4. Email. One person, something real from their own site, and the offer in the first sentence.
5. Offer. Work through an offer checklist: the buyer's problem, the proof, the price, the first step. Imagine the fields you have no data for rather than leaving them blank.

3. Before it ships

1. Checks. Read the piece as the reader, once for the stake and once for the payload. Check it against your failure-case list.
2. True claims. Every number keeps its base, and every quote is the speaker's own words. Don't hedge a true claim.
3. Ship it. A page can be undone, so publish it, then send the owner the reading view.
4. Read what readers did. After a week, read what readers did on the page and add any finding to the failure-case list.

Use it

Hand it to your agent: give it this page's address, or paste the runbook into the chat, and ask it to follow the steps.

Used by

• writing (kit)