---
title: Playbook v2
teaser: Announcing the second major version of our playbook.
tags: news,playbook
author: Dan Croak
published_on: 2014-01-07
---

We're pleased to announce the second major, 14,000 word version of our
[playbook][playbook]. We're giving it away for free and licensing it as
[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial][license].

[playbook]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com
[license]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0

The playbook is the most comprehensive description that we've ever gathered of
how we run our company and how we make web and mobile products. We did not
invent many of the techniques we describe, but we use them regularly in the
course of doing real work.

## Old

We released the first version in [August of 2011][v1].

[v1]: http://bostinno.streetwise.co/channels/thoughtbot-releases-playbook-for-building-web-mobile-applications/

Some of our tools and techniques are the same as then, such as [Heroku][heroku]
for application hosting, [New Relic][new relic] for performance monitoring, and
[Airbrake][airbrake] for error tracking.

[heroku]: http://heroku.com
[new relic]: http://newrelic.com
[airbrake]: http://airbrake.io

The [developing][developing] section is strongly influenced by [Extreme
Programming rules][xp], which continues to be best practice well into its
second decade of popularity.

[developing]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#developing
[xp]: http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules.html

## New

Some things are new.

Right up front are [product design sprints][sprint], strongly influenced by
[Google Ventures' design team](http://www.gv.com/design).

[sprint]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#product-design-sprint

Another overhauled section is about using Trello to manage our
[planning][planning] (strongly influenced by [UserVoice][uservoice]),
[sales][sales], and [hiring][hiring] processes.

[planning]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#planning
[uservoice]: http://community.uservoice.com/blog/trello-google-docs-product-management/
[sales]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#sales
[hiring]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#hiring

We mention for the first time our [style guide][style] and how to follow the
guidelines pragmatically.

[style]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#style-guide

We include a [production checklist][checklist] to make sure we don't forget an
important part of a production deployment before launch.

[checklist]: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#checklist

We mention [Zapier][zapier] quite a few times. It has become important to us as
glue between systems like StackOverflow and Campfire, FreshBooks and Campfire,
email to Trello, Trello to Campfire, Stripe to Campfire, Wufoo to Trello, and a
few others.

[zapier]: http://zapier.com

## PDF, MOBI, and EPUB

The <abbr title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</abbr> version is free at
[http://playbook.thoughtbot.com][playbook]. You can get the <abbr
title="Portable Document Format">PDF</abbr>, MOBI, and EPUB versions for free by
subscribing to get our blog posts weekly via email.

We hope you find it useful.