Playbooks

What a playbook carries

Starting a campaign from a blank canvas means deciding everything yourself: which stages the work moves through, what kinds of cards exist, when something counts as done. A playbook makes those decisions once and carries them into every board you create from it:

• The phases: the stages of the campaign, laid out as regions on the canvas.
• The card types: which kinds of cards exist on this board, from research notes to full deliverables.
• The statuses: which statuses are enabled and the colors they show in.
• The connection types: which kinds of links between cards are allowed, so lineage stays meaningful.
• Starter cards: seed cards that come with real content instead of empty placeholders. Each one carries a short pinned brief that says what the card is for.
• The program: an ordered checklist of steps, each with a prompt you can hand straight to your agent. More on this below.
• The method: the marketing thinking behind the playbook, written out. Read it in the app, or on the playbook's own page in the public library.
• Board guidance: text that tells your agent how to behave on this board (what the process is, what belongs where, what good looks like).

None of it is locked in. A board created from a playbook is a normal board: add phases, rename things, delete starter cards you don't need. The playbook decides where you start, not where you end up.

The official library

Fourteen official playbooks ship with Plainpaper, and each is a complete campaign process rather than a set of empty columns. The flagship is Ecommerce campaign: six phases running Research → Audience → Strategy → Create → Launch → Measure, a campaign brief that prompts you for objective, offer, audience, and channels, and email and creative deliverables pre-mounted, so a drafted email arrives as a structured email card with a subject, a preheader, and a real rendered body. Around it sit playbooks for product launches, welcome series, post-purchase flows, winback, content calendars, content repurposing, competitor analysis, positioning sprints, giveaways, quiz funnels, paid social test-and-learn, AI search visibility, and the BFCM backwards plan.

Browse them on the Playbooks page in the app, or in the public library, where every playbook has its own page with the phases and starter cards it sets up. Most of the library is on every plan, including free. Two are premium playbooks, part of the paid plans: AI search visibility and BFCM: The Backwards Plan.

The Quickstart uses the Ecommerce campaign playbook for a reason: fill in the brief, brief your agent, and the campaign has somewhere sensible to go from the first minute.

Creating a board from a playbook

In the app, click New board and pick a playbook. Each one shows a pannable preview of its real structure, the actual phase columns and cards rather than a marketing thumbnail, so you see exactly what you're committing to. The wizard then asks a few short intake questions (what the brand is called, what you're promoting, who it's for, what success looks like) and uses your answers to personalize the starter cards. A launch date is optional; you can decide it later. A checkbox on the same flow lets you opt the new board out of your workspace guidelines if this board shouldn't follow them.

Your agent can do this too: it can list the playbooks available in your workspace (the official library and any private ones of your own) and create a board from one. Either way, every board remembers which playbook, and which version of it, it was created from.

List the playbooks available in Plainpaper and create a board from the Ecommerce campaign playbook called "Black Friday 2026: P&P Bookstore".

Then read the new board and tell me which starter cards it came with, so I know where to start.

Following the program

A board created from an official playbook knows what step the campaign is on, and says so in the board header: "Step 2 of 5". Click it and the program unfolds as a checklist: each step, what it produces, its own rule for when it counts as done, and a prompt you can copy straight to your agent to do that step's work. You never have to wonder what to ask next.

Progress is computed from the cards themselves. A step is done when the cards it's responsible for reach the status it asks for; there is no manual checkbox, and no way for an agent to report progress it didn't make. In practice the handoff is simple: when your agent finishes a draft it sets the card to awaiting approval, which surfaces it for your review and moves the program forward. The step indicator can never disagree with the board under it.

Your own playbooks

On the paid plans, playbooks flow the other way too. Any board you've already built can become one: save it as a private workspace playbook and your recurring campaign (the product launch you run every quarter, the promo cycle you've refined over a year) becomes a process you can start again in one click, with its category colors and icons preserved. Private playbooks live only in your workspace; nobody else sees them.

You can also share a playbook: sharing generates a code, and anyone with a paid Plainpaper account can import it into their own workspace. Imported starter cards always land as drafts. And if you'd rather describe your process than build it board by board, the playbook builder turns a description into a draft playbook: a short wizard asks one question per screen, the draft lands on a review page, and you refine it by saying what to change.

Playbooks steer the agent

The part of a playbook you never see on the canvas may matter most: its guidance text reaches your agent automatically at the start of every session on that board. Even in a fresh chat, days later, on a different device, the agent opens the board already knowing the campaign process, without you re-explaining it. Together with brand guidelines (how your brand speaks, workspace-wide) and card comments (what to change, card by card), playbook guidance is the third layer of steering: how this kind of campaign is run.

Related

• Set up your first campaign: a full campaign on the Ecommerce campaign playbook.
• Boards & the canvas: what phases, statuses, and connections are.
• Deliverables: the structured email and creative cards playbooks pre-mount.
• The public playbook library: every playbook as its own page, with the phases and starter cards it sets up.
• Campaign playbooks: end-to-end boards, from brief through to results.