Playbooks & 4-Phases
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Make sure you have the Playbooks Library repo cloned into your Documents/GitHub folder (not the Playbooks Site — the Playbooks Library). Once it's cloned, pick two or three projects that interest you, open their implementation playbooks, and browse the content. Read the one-pager, the architect punch list, and the four phases for each. If you've worked on similar projects before, compare how LeanScale structures them versus what you're used to.
Cloning the Playbooks Library
To access the implementation playbooks, you need to clone the Playbooks Library repo. Open VS Code, open the sidebar (Command+B), click Open Folder, and navigate to your Documents/GitHub directory. If you followed the GitHub setup in the AI course, your cloned repos should already be there.
If you don't see the Playbooks Library, open GitHub Desktop, click Current Repo, then Add/Clone Repo, and find the Playbooks Library. Make sure you're cloning the Playbooks Library, not the Playbooks Site — those are two different repos. Clone it into Documents/GitHub.
What's Inside the Repo
Once you open the Playbooks Library, you'll see the 14 core projects listed as the first batch. These line up with the 14 on the public site at playbooks.leanscale.team. After that comes the extended playbook library with 55+ additional projects.
The external version of the site is watered down — it would be overwhelming to publicly share all of the internal detail. The internal version has the full depth, and this is the one you'll be working from day to day.
Structure of Each Project
Expand any project — say, Growth Model — and you'll find a few things. First, the playbook folder containing the three playbooks for that project (methodology, advisory, and implementation). Second, a Teamwork task list with the milestones, task lists, and individual tasks that get uploaded into Teamwork when the project is being executed. If you open that task list, you'll see not just the milestones but the individual tasks broken down for completing the project end to end.
Every project follows this same structure. There are also Assets and Skills folders, which are empty at the time of recording and will be populated throughout 2026. The main ones you need access to right now are the playbook itself and the Teamwork task list.
The Four Phases
When you open an implementation playbook and expand the table of contents on the right sidebar, you'll see that it's broken down into four phases: Strategy, Engineering, Enablement, and Handoff. Each phase is further broken down into sub-phases. For the Strategy phase, that includes Pre-Kickoff, Kickoff, Alignment Loop, and Strategic Sign-Off.
This structure is the same across every project. Growth Model, Sales Lifecycle, CPQ Implementation, HubSpot to Salesforce Migration, Lead Routing — all 60+ projects follow the four-phase breakdown. The phases are customized for each project, but the framework is consistent. When we refer to "the four phases" in upcoming trainings, this is exactly where to find them — inside the implementation playbook of whichever project you're working on.
You can use the external site at playbooks.leanscale.team to get a sense of which projects interest you, and then go into the internal repo to see the full implementation playbook with all four phases laid out. The upcoming trainings in this module go deep into what each phase entails, the principles behind them, and how they operate in practice across different types of projects.