The Playbook That Went Missing: A Paved-Path Knowledge Platform for Safer, Faster Delivery

This article isn\u2019t about fancy ai copilots or yet another bespoke wiki. It\u2019s about institutional memory: the tacit knowledge that lets teams ship safely when people move on, scale, or go on vacation. We codified that memory into three domains: Runbooks for operations, Incident Wisdom from postmortems, and the

Architecture Rationale that explains why decisions were made, not just what was decided. We stored all three as docs-as-code in a Git-backed repository, so every decision, every operator checklist, and every rationale travels with the code and changes with the platform. On a typical week, a new on-call engineer can

pull up the current runbook, read the postmortem narrative, and understand the rationale behind the chosen approach, all without paging through a dozen disparate sources. The result is a single source of truth that survives org changes, hiring ramps, and migrations between tooling ecosystems.

In practice, this turned a fragile memory system into a durability feature. For instance, after a incident where refunds were misprocessed due to an out-of-date runbook, the team moved to a strict PR-driven process for all production runbooks and ADRs, with automated consistency checks. The platform began to feel like

the codebase itself: you could ship features, roll back safely, and onboard new engineers in days rather than weeks because the knowledge was anchored to the same cadence as the work.