How personas and playbooks work
A persona is the kind of expert a runner acts as. It decides how the runner works and what it hands back: a merged change, a document, a mockup or a conversation. A playbook chains experts together: it's an ordered list of stages, each pairing an expert with what that stage delivers.
This page explains the ideas behind both. For the steps, see Choose a persona for a task, Create a playbook and Run a playbook on a task. Every field is described in Playbooks and Persona details.
Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Persona | The kind of expert that runs a task. You pick it under Advanced when you start a task. |
| Playbook | An ordered list of stages a piece of work goes through. |
| Stage | One step of a playbook: an Expert and the Deliverable it hands back. |
| Built-in | One of the four playbooks every organization has. Read-only. |
| Your playbooks | The playbooks your organization made. |
Personas
Every task runs as one persona. Coder is the default. The others you can pick are:
| Persona | Hands back |
|---|---|
| Coder | The work built and shipped as a merged change. |
| Business analyst | A requirements document. |
| Architect | An architecture document. |
| Researcher | A report on one question, plus a docs change when the findings are worth keeping. |
| Test optimizer | A change that reduces the cost of your test suite. |
| Onboarding engineer | An existing repository prepared to take tasks. |
| Translate | New and changed text translated into your project's other languages. |
| Prototyper | A quick mockup, never a change. The Sketch size picks it for you. |
| Advisor | A conversation in the console. The Chat involvement picks it for you. |
A persona's page shows its Mode (build changes code, analysis doesn't), how it can end, and what it must hand over. You open it from Audit, on the Personas tab. Nothing on it can be changed.
Playbooks
A playbook's Chain draws its stages in order. Each stage says who does the work (Always this expert, or User selects from the Allowed experts), what it delivers (such as a Pull request, a Document or a Plan), what it waits for, and whether it asks questions. When some stages run once for each planned item, the chain groups them into Prepare, Build × N and Finish.
The four built-ins are Task, Sketch, Chat and Epic. They describe how those kinds of work already run: the Epic playbook is the chain an epic follows, and the Chat playbook is an advisor chat. To change a built-in, duplicate it and edit the copy.
Everyone in your organization can read every playbook. Creating, editing, duplicating and deleting playbooks needs the Owner or Admin role.
Running a playbook
Playbooks are marked Preview. A task runs one of your own playbooks only when your organization's Playbooks setting is on in Settings. Then the new task form shows a Playbook size, and each stage runs as the persona its stage names. The built-ins aren't offered there. Once the task is saved, its playbook can't be changed: the button says Playbook is fixed after save.
A playbook's stages are tasks like any other, so they move through the states in How tasks work.