Fixify innovations

October 2, 2025

min read

Announcing Smart Personalized Playbooks: Turning tribal knowledge into IT jet fuel

Peter Silberman

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Do you remember what driving was like before GPS? You had to “know a guy” with the shortcuts — which alley to cut through, which exit to avoid at 5pm.

That’s how most help desks still operate: running on undocumented team lore, leaving your smartest systems — and your newest teammates — navigating without directions. Every IT team knows the feeling: you solve a tough issue and think, ‘If only that fix was written down.’ The problem? Documenting takes hours, and by the time it’s done, the playbook’s already outdated.

That’s why today we launched Smart Personalized Playbooks — auto-generating your team’s know-how into living playbooks that stay current, without the wasted hours of documentation.

What do Smart Personalized Playbooks do?

When knowledge stays locked in people's heads, it's invisible to AI. And that means it's unusable at scale. When it comes to IT teams there are three types of knowledge:

Explicit knowledge: Manuals, FAQs, SOPs — the recipe you can email around.
Tacit knowledge: Personal know-how built over years — the skills you feel rather than articulate. Think of a chef who doesn’t measure garlic, just knows when it’s right.
Tribal knowledge: Tacit knowledge that’s absorbed by a specific team – the shared lore, unwritten rules, and quirky workarounds only “the team” knows, like why no one upgrades that finicky system or the undocumented fix everyone on this help desk uses.

AI only sees explicit knowledge. Everything else is a blind spot. Since only a small portion of an IT team's knowledge is written down, your smartest tools — and your people — are operating half-blind.

Smart Personalized Playbooks solve that problem. They transform your call transcripts, messaging threads, and ticket history into tailored playbooks. Forget perfect documentation — with natural language and a few clicks, your team’s know-how becomes something handcrafted for your environment, ready to tackle real IT issues with speed and fidelity.

Here’s how it works:

Start with a Fixify Standard Playbook. Our library of 40+ “gold-standard” IT processes comes ready to go out of the box. They’re the baseline starting point for our smart personalization. Already have a playbook? Upload a PDF and we’ll start from there.
Enhance and personalize. We pull in the unique ways your team resolves tickets — from calls, messages, solved tickets, and existing docs — and create a personalized playbook that matches exactly how you work.
Review recommended changes. Now you’re in control. You’ll see the current version and the new draft side by side, with changes highlighted, so you can see exactly what’s changed, tweak it with natural language, and lock it in as your Smart Personalized Playbook.
Publish into action. Once you approve, playbooks are published with clear citations that explain when and why they were changed. From there, Fixify’s Sidekicks and analysts start using them immediately — so tickets are always worked using the most current process.‍
Keep them up to date. Fixify continuously monitors calls, messages, and tickets for process changes, recommending playbook updates whenever they make sense. You can simply review and republish with a click, so your playbooks stay accurate, never go stale, and your automations keep running without any hiccups.

What’s cool about Smart Personalized Playbooks


One-click playbooks	Generate playbooks specific to how you work at the push of a button — no coding, no dragging boxes around or spending hours building and maintaining them.
Knowledge that stays fresh	Playbooks are regenerated as processes change, staying fresh and aligned with how work actually gets done.
Always accurate docs that confidently power automation	Critical know-how moves out of people’s heads and into living playbooks — so it doesn’t walk out the door when roles shift.
Tailored and transparent	Playbooks adapt to each customer’s environment, with clear citations so you always know where updates come from.

Four reasons it’s harder than it looks

On the surface, “turning tacit knowledge into playbooks” sounds straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but. Here’s some of the behind-the-scenes work that went into making the magic happen.

1. Defining quality when no one agrees. There’s no industry standard for what a “great IT playbook” looks like when you combine process, people, and technology. And without a ground truth, quality reviews become subjective and inconsistent. Our approach? Write ~50 playbooks across customers and categories, then fold SME feedback into a living benchmark for what high-quality playbooks should look like.

2. Ensuring new playbook steps would work. We hacked together preview tools in Hex so stakeholders could interact asynchronously with generated content. That let us test playbooks in the wild and catch gaps early — things like missing rollback steps, fuzzy escalation paths, or instructions that looked good on paper but broke down in practice.

3. Architecting for reuse, not one-offs. To avoid reinventing the wheel for every customer, we built a layered architecture inspired by Object Oriented Programming (OOP): Standard → Custom → Refresh. The Fixify Standard layer defines the canon — structure, formatting, and safety rules. The custom layer injects environment-specific overrides like tool stacks or escalation protocols. The refresh layer regenerates content, diffs changes, and flags risky edits for expert review. This design wasn’t elegance for its own sake — it drives reusability, traceability, and safe propagation of updates across customers. The payoff is simple: duplication is minimized, updates flow safely, and every playbook stays consistent and accountable.

4. Wrestling with messy, diverse data. Our inputs came from Slack threads, ticket histories, knowledge base PDFs, and call transcripts — each with its own flavor of pain. Slack was endless chatter that needed summarization just to find a signal. Ticket data arrived in inconsistent formats with noisy metadata. PDFs were scattered, each structured differently. And transcripts were long and unstructured. The sheer variance made one-size-fits-all preprocessing impossible. We overcame it with hybrid strategies — combining summarization, retrieval-augmented search, and structured reviews — so the system could reliably extract high-value context while keeping latency and compute costs in check.

Closing thoughts

Tribal knowledge isn’t bad. In fact, it’s often brilliant. But it’s fragile. Lose the people, and you lose the knowledge. And good luck sharing it telepathically with AI and automation.

The future belongs to teams that can capture that brilliance, make it explicit, and scale it. That’s what Smart Personalized Playbooks do: take your know-how, document it, and operationalize it.

Or put another way: if your IT processes still live in someone’s head, your help desk is running on vibes. Fixify turns those vibes into something repeatable, reviewable, and scalable.

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