Playbooks, directives, recommendations, and experiments

What this page is

If you belong to a franchise network, your franchisor (HQ) can send content straight into your account: a process to adopt, an instruction to follow, a suggestion to consider, or a test they want to run across several locations. Verinode calls all four of these a plan, and groups them under one inbox: Network Playbooks.

Verinode does not author these for you and does not push them on HQ's behalf. It is the pipe: HQ writes the content in their own Decisions workspace, chooses which memberships to send it to, and Verinode delivers it into your account and tracks what you do with it. You decide whether to acknowledge it, start it, decline it, or mark it done.

Where to find it

Look for Network Playbooks in your sidebar, sitting between Decisions and Action Plans. It only appears when you have at least one item that still needs your attention, with a badge showing how many. If your queue is fully caught up (everything acknowledged, declined, or completed), the sidebar entry disappears rather than sitting there empty.

Clicking it opens /network/playbooks. On mobile, the same inbox lives at /m/network/playbooks, and a matching contextual row appears in the Business overlay whenever you have something open.

The page header reads:

Network playbooks Playbooks, directives, and recommendations your franchisor has sent you. Open each to acknowledge, work on, decline, or complete.

The four kinds, and why the distinction matters

Every item you receive carries a kind label at the top left of its row, in small caps: Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment. These are not four names for the same thing. HQ picks the kind when they write the item, and the kind signals how much latitude you have and how firmly it is meant.

Playbook. A canonical, multi-step process HQ wants standardized across the network, something like a repeatable operating procedure for handling a certain job type, a vendor relationship, or a recurring workflow. It is meant to be followed step by step and reused, not a one-time ask. If HQ has published a template library, playbooks are the kind most likely to have come from one.

Directive. A one-shot instruction with an expectation attached: do this, by this date. Directives read more like a mandate than a suggestion. They still move through the same optional acknowledge-and-decline flow as everything else (Verinode does not gate access based on how you respond), but the language and intent behind a directive is firmer than a recommendation.

Recommendation. A soft nudge with no enforcement behind it: guidance HQ wants to surface, not a rule. Treat a recommendation as something worth reading and weighing against your own situation, with the expectation that saying no carries no consequence.

Experiment. A network-level test, the kind HQ uses when they want to try an approach with a subset of memberships before rolling it out further. If you have been asked to try something newer or less proven than a standard playbook, it likely arrived as an experiment.

None of the four kinds change what you can do with the item on your end. The buttons available to you (see below) are identical regardless of kind. The kind exists so you understand the sender's intent before you decide how to act on it.

The inbox: Active and Closed

The inbox splits your items into two groups, each with a count in its header:

• Active (N): items still open (New, Acknowledged, or In progress).
• Closed (N): items you have already resolved (Declined or Completed).

A closed item is not deleted. If you want to revisit a completed playbook later to check what you agreed to or when you finished it, it stays in Closed permanently.

Each row in either group shows:

• Kind (Playbook / Directive / Recommendation / Experiment), in small caps.
• The sending network name, after a middle dot, so if you belong to more than one group you can tell them apart.
• The title HQ gave the item.
• A one- or two-line preview of the body, if HQ wrote one. Some items arrive with a title only.
• A status pill on the right: New, Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed.
• A relative timestamp under the pill: today, "N days ago," or "N months ago," measured from when HQ pushed it to you.

Clicking anywhere on a row opens its detail page.

Empty state. If your franchise network has never pushed you anything, the page reads:

Your franchise network hasn't sent you any playbooks yet.

The detail page

Opening an item takes you to /network/playbooks/<id>, laid out flat with hairline dividers, no card wrapped around any block.

Header pills. Three pills sit above the title: the kind, the current status, and "From [network name]."

Title. The headline HQ gave the item.

Detail. The body text HQ wrote, if any. If HQ sent the item without a body, this section reads:

Your franchise network sent this [playbook / directive / recommendation / experiment] without additional detail.

Sponsorship (only when HQ has funded it). Some networks commit an Intelligence Unit budget to cover AI work you do on a specific playbook, so working it does not draw down your own balance. When that is the case, a block appears:

Sponsorship: [network name] is covering AI help on this playbook

with three figures side by side:

• Budget: the total IUs the network committed for you on this item.
• Used: how many of those sponsored IUs have been drawn down so far.
• Remaining: budget minus used (floored at zero, so it never reads negative).

Below the numbers: "Open the IQ panel from this page to use the sponsored IUs. Your own balance only kicks in once the sponsor cap is reached." Concretely, this means chatting with IQ while you are on this exact detail page draws from the sponsor's pool first; your own monthly IU allocation is untouched until the sponsor's budget is exhausted. If a network hasn't committed a budget for an item, this whole block is absent, there is nothing "zero" to show.

Your notes. If you left a note the last time you changed status (most commonly on decline), it appears here under "Your notes," so you can see what you told your franchisor without having to remember it.

Lifecycle. A row of up to four dates: Pushed, Acknowledged, Started, and either Declined or Completed depending on how the item ended. Any stage that hasn't happened yet shows a dash.

Update status. Buttons for every status you're currently allowed to move to. The path is one-directional and narrows as you go:

1. 1New items can move to Acknowledged, In progress, or Declined.
2. 2Acknowledged items can move to In progress or Declined.
3. 3In progress items can move to Completed or Declined.
4. 4Completed and Declined are both terminal, no further status changes.

Clicking Decline does not submit immediately. It opens an inline text box: "Why are you declining? (Optional, your franchisor can see this.)" You can leave it blank or add a note, then hit Confirm decline to submit, or Cancel to back out without changing status. Every other transition (Acknowledged, In progress, Completed) submits on a single click, the button reads "Saving…" while it writes.

Once an item reaches Completed or Declined, the Update status block disappears entirely: there is nothing further to do with it.

On the mobile side, opening a playbook you were never sent (for example, an old link after HQ pushed it to someone else) shows:

Not available This playbook isn't associated with your account. If you think this is a mistake, ask your franchise network admin to confirm they pushed it to your operator profile.

This is deliberate: Verinode does not confirm or deny that a given playbook ID exists at all if you weren't sent it. It reads as "not yours," not a broken link.

How to use this well

For a Playbook, read it as a process to adopt into how you run that part of the business, then mark In progress once you start following it and Completed once it is fully in place. For a Directive, note the deadline in the body text (Verinode doesn't track directive deadlines as a separate field, they live in what HQ wrote) and treat In progress as your marker that you are actively working toward it. For a Recommendation, weigh it against your own numbers, your Margin and Benchmarks views are the fastest way to check whether a network-wide suggestion actually fits your situation, before deciding whether to adopt it. For an Experiment, expect the process to be less settled than a standard playbook and know that your outcome may feed into whether HQ rolls it out further.

If a sponsorship block is present, do your AI-assisted work on that item from its detail page so the sponsored budget gets drawn instead of your own monthly allocation.

What this is not

Network Playbooks is not where Verinode's own signals or benchmark-derived recommendations live, those surface in the Feed and Decisions. This inbox is exclusively content your franchisor authored and chose to send you. It is also not a two-way messaging thread: replying happens through the status note on decline, not through open-ended back-and-forth on the item itself.

Related reading

• The Decision Workspace
• Acting on Decisions
• The Feed
• How Benchmarks Work
• Understanding Your Margin

Data sources