Scenario Playbook Builder: Handle Every Crisis the Same Way Twice
Build incident, escalation, recall, and outage playbooks — with triggers, roles, and decision branches — then launch a live run that tracks who did which step and when, so high-stakes situations get handled consistently every time.
A web tool where you author scenario playbooks (triggers, roles, branching steps, escalation contacts), an owner approves and publishes each one, an incident launches a live run that assigns and checks off steps with timestamps and sign-offs, and you export playbooks plus full run history to CSV for the after-action review.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your existing playbooks or SOPs (even as Word docs or a Sheet)
- Your team roster with roles and contacts
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
When something goes sideways — a security incident, a furious key customer, a product recall, a site outage, a safety event — the worst time to figure out the steps is in the middle of it. Yet that's exactly what happens. The real playbook lives in someone's head or a stale Word doc nobody can find at 2 a.m. Two different leads handle the same scenario two different ways. A critical escalation gets skipped because nobody was sure whose job it was. And after it's over, the after-action review is a foggy reconstruction of who did what, because nobody was tracking it as it happened.
The cost isn't just a messy response — it's repeated mistakes, missed legal or safety obligations, and a team that never gets better because there's no clean record to learn from. You don't need an expensive enterprise incident platform to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool with two halves. First, a playbook builder: you author each scenario as a structured playbook — its trigger (what kicks it off), the roles involved (incident commander, comms lead, on-call engineer, safety officer), the steps with decision branches ("Is customer data involved? → if yes, notify legal"), and the escalation contacts. A playbook owner reviews and approves it before it can go live, and every published change creates a new version so you always know which one was in force.
Second, a live run engine: when a real incident hits, anyone authorized launches a run of the right playbook. The tool walks the team through the branches, assigns each step to the responsible role, and lets people check steps off with timestamps. Escalation and closeout steps require the responsible person's sign-off before the run can advance. When it's done, you close the run and you've got a clean, timestamped timeline of who did what when — ready for the after-action review and exportable to CSV.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which scenarios you actually need playbooks for, your real roles and roster, how your steps branch on decisions, who's allowed to launch a run, your escalation and sign-off rules, your typical and peak incident volume, and the messy exceptions that bite you — and then it tailors the data model, the branching logic, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through building the playbook editor, the owner approval and versioning, the run launcher, role-based step assignment, the check-off and sign-off flow, the escalation gate, run closeout, and the CSV exports — each with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and use the whole thing today even with no integration to any existing system.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is tooling for high-stakes moments, so it ships with the controls a serious ops, support, or safety team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's playbooks and runs, a complete audit trail of who authored, approved, launched, checked off, and signed which steps and when, a hard human-approval gate so a playbook can't go live until its owner publishes it (and escalation/closeout steps can't be skipped without the responsible person's sign-off), and duplicate guards keyed on playbook ID + version and one run ID per incident, so the same playbook isn't double-published and the same incident isn't run twice.
Who it's for
Ops, support, and safety leads who own the response to recurring critical scenarios and are tired of every crisis being handled a little differently. If you can describe how your team should respond when the alarm goes off, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll have your first published playbook ready to launch the same weekend.