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Last summer, we scaled down to just our founding team and a handful of contractors, and we didn't lose productivity or velocity. It was a revelation: we could maintain our pace without expanding our team.

The longer we work on the company, the more confident I’ve become that we don’t need to hire anytime soon. However, to do this successfully, we need a system. That's where playbooks come in.

If you're trying to stay lean while scaling or want to document your processes better before making your next hire, this one's for you.

Let's dive in.

What is a Playbook?

A playbook is essentially the same thing as a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)—I prefer to call them playbooks because they feel more specific to Chezie's culture. A playbook is a document that shares how to do a process, why it's important, and (most importantly) the step-by-step instructions to execute it properly.

Why Playbooks Matter

Playbooks become increasingly important as your company scales for a few reasons:

1. They cut onboarding time by allowing people to learn processes asynchronously. The more async you can be, especially as a remote company, the better.

2. They lead to better questions from team members. Instead of asking basic "how do I do this" questions, team members can come to you with more pointed questions about why you chose to do something a certain way or how flexible you are about potentially changing that process.

3. They make expertise transferable. Every founder eventually realizes that what they're doing isn't scalable – answering every customer email, talking to every customer, or fixing every bug yourself just isn't sustainable. Playbooks help you focus on high-value work by making your processes accessible to others.

4. They maintain consistency as you grow. If you're a company of 25 people rapidly growing to 50, your new hires need to understand how you've been doing things, even if they'll eventually revamp those processes.

To be clear: playbooks are not an alternative to hiring. Rather, if you're going to hire, you absolutely need playbooks. They're the artifacts that help others understand your processes without you having to explain everything from zero..

Examples - Our Chezie Playbooks

We've created several playbooks at Chezie that have streamlined our operations. Here are a few examples:

Product Playbook

Our Product Playbook outlines how we run our product sprints, identifies the members of our product team, and articulates our product vision. I recently updated this for 2025 as we've made some strategic pivots, moving Chezie more toward a general community management platform for enterprises rather than one specifically for Employee Resource Groups.

This playbook ensures that everyone understands not just what we're building, but why, and keeps the entire team aligned with our product direction.

Sales Playbook

Our Sales Playbook details how we handle each sales process step, from awareness through acquisition and retention. It documents the tools we use—Hubspot, Pipedrive, Unify GTM, etc.) and explains our processes for discovery calls, demos, and other customer touchpoints.

This documentation has become increasingly valuable as I have become more involved in the sales process. For most of our time working on Chezie, my sister/co-founder, Dumebi, has led sales. But I have the playbook to rely on if I need to take a discovery call or capitalize on an intro to a prospect. Also, if/when we hire a sales admin to handle back-office tasks or an SDR, having this playbook will significantly reduce the onboarding time.

QA Playbook

Our most recent addition is our QA Playbook, which I'll use as a detailed example in the next section. This playbook was born out of necessity – I had spent 1-3 hours daily on quality assurance for new features, which I realized could be better spent elsewhere.

More importantly, I recognized that having me do the QA was actually counterproductive. Since I know every aspect of how our product works, I wasn't approaching testing with the same perspective as our everyday users. Plus, when I spotted issues, I would often try to fix them myself rather than documenting them properly.

Creating this playbook allowed us to transition QA responsibilities to our administrative assistant Kate, freeing up my time while actually improving our quality assurance process.

How to Build Your Playbook

Creating a comprehensive playbook takes time, but the investment pays off tremendously. Here's the 10-step process I used to make our QA playbook (consider it a playbook for playbooks 😏)

1. Identify your Tech Stack

You'll need a few basic tools to create an effective playbook:

• A place to store your playbooks (Notion, Google Drive)

• A diagramming tool for visualizing processes (Figma, Canva, Miro)

• ChatGPT (optional, but highly recommended)

2. Outline the Core Components

In your planning tool (we use Notion - if you don’t already, sign up for Notion using my link), outline everything you'd want someone to know about this process. Your outline should cover:

• What the process is

• Why it's important

• Roles and responsibilities

• Process-specific items and steps

Don't worry about being all-encompassing at this stage – get the core structure down.

3. Let AI Find the Gaps

Go to ChatGPT and share your outline. This is where the magic happens.

Tell ChatGPT to act as an expert in your specific process with 10 years of experience working in startups. For example: "You are an expert in quality assurance with 10 years of experience working in SaaS startups."

Tell ChatGPT to act as an expert in your specific process with 10 years of experience working in startups. Ask it to review your outline and identify any gaps or missing components. These insights are invaluable – ChatGPT will often point out steps, considerations, or edge cases that wouldn't have occurred to you.

Here’s a sample prompt:

You are an expert in {playbook topic} with 10 years of experience working in {companies like yours}.

Review my playbook outline (note, playbook = standard operating procedure) below and identify any gaps or missing components that would make this playbook more comprehensive:

[Paste your outline here]

Please point out:
- Any missing steps in the process
- Critical edge cases I should address
- Tools or techniques that successful {process} teams use
- Common pitfalls I should warn about
- Metrics or KPIs I should include

I want this playbook to be complete enough that someone with no {process} experience could follow it successfully.

4. Update Your Outline

Take ChatGPT's feedback and incorporate it into your outline. This back-and-forth process helps create a more comprehensive document before you start writing the content.

5. Generate Interview Questions

Give your refined outline back to ChatGPT and ask it to generate interview questions about the outline. The goal is to give you questions that prompt you enough to tell ChatGPT what this process should look like.

6. Respond to the Interview Questions

Open a separate document to answer the questions ChatGPT generated. I HIGHLY recommend using Wispr because I can simply speak my answers, and it will transcribe them. I find that I talk about something, I’m much more detailed than if I were to write it out.

7. Draft the First Version

Let ChatGPT do its thing. Give it your responses to those questions and ask it to draft the first version of your playbook.

Pro-tip: Tell ChatGPT to draft the playbook section by section, instead of drafting the entire thing simultaneously. I’ve found that you get higher-quality outputs when you break a document up.

8. Refine Until Comprehensive

Review the draft and refine it until it covers everything. This might take several iterations, but don't rush this step – the quality of your playbook directly impacts its effectiveness.

9. Add Visual Elements (Optional but Recommended)

Build flow charts in Figma or create slide decks in Pitch to help visualize the processes. These visuals make the playbook easier to digest and are especially important for complex processes.

For our QA playbook, I spent about ~2 hours building this flowchart to visualize our QA process. Doing so helped me identify things that I missed the first time through, and I was able to catch them before sharing this with our team.

10. Share With Your Team

Finally, share the playbook with your team. This isn't just a one-way handoff – use it as an opportunity to gather feedback and ensure everyone understands the processes.

Creating our QA playbook took between 10-15 hours spread across a week, with another 2-3 hours of refinement the following week. That might sound like a lot, but considering the amount of time I spent doing this over the past year (2 hours per week x 52 weeks = 104 hours; that’s 2.5 working weeks!), it’s absolutely worth it.

I hope that within a few weeks, I’ll spend no more than 30 minutes/week reviewing QA before we push new features to production.

From Documentation to Action

A playbook is only valuable if it's actually used. When team members ask questions covered in a playbook, I redirect them to the documentation. If someone deviates from our processes, I reference the playbook in my feedback. For new documentation, I share it so people can review it asynchronously, and then schedule a call to answer any lingering questions they have.

We revisit our playbooks every six months, aligning with Chezie's operational cycles to ensure our documentation evolves alongside our business.

The Bottom Line

Building comprehensive playbooks takes time (plan on 10-20 hours each), but it's an investment that pays dividends.

By documenting your processes, you create systems that work even when you're not directly involved. That's how you truly scale a founding team without constantly adding headcount.

See you next week,

Toby