For: admins and editors. This is the part of a persona that decides whether it is useful or just a list.
A persona has two halves. The prose describes the role: what it is responsible for, how it works, what it never does. The routes attach playbooks to that role, each with a condition saying when to reach for it.
Write the prose as a briefing, not a summary
The prose is what someone adopting the role reads first, and it should be what you would tell a competent new colleague on their first morning — the responsibilities, the standards, the things that go wrong. Do not summarise the attached playbooks here; they speak for themselves when they load, and a summary of them is one more thing to keep in sync.
Leave the condition empty unless you have a reason
This is the part that surprises people, and it is the single most useful thing to know: an empty condition is the normal state, not an unfinished one.
When a route has no condition, the playbook's own description is used instead — and it is read fresh every time, so improving the description improves every persona that routes to it, at once, with nothing to update.
Write a condition only where the description is not the right trigger for this particular persona. The same playbook can mean different things in two roles: an offer template might be “when the customer asks for pricing” in a sales persona and “when checking a colleague's draft” in a review persona. That difference belongs in the condition. Anything the description already says does not.
⚠️ The temptation is to copy the description into the condition to “make it explicit”. Do not — the copy goes stale the moment the description improves, and nothing anywhere will tell you it has.
Conditions are prose, not syntax
A condition is read and judged as language. There are no operators, no keywords, no matching rules, and nothing is parsed — so write it the way you would explain the trigger to a person.
Good: “when the customer has already complained once about the same order”. Poor: “complaint AND repeat=true”, which reads as machinery to a reader who has to interpret it as meaning.
Order matters, and re-attaching changes it
Routes are ordered, and the order is the order they are considered in. Put the specific cases before the general ones, or the catch-all will answer for everything.
⚠️ Attaching a playbook that is already attached does not update it in place — it moves that route to the end of the list. If you re-attach something to change its condition, check the ordering afterwards.
If a playbook is deleted
Its route disappears with it. There is no broken link and no placeholder, because a route to something that does not exist is not a route with a hole in it — it is not a route. The persona simply has one fewer, so a persona that quietly stopped covering a case is worth checking against its route list.
A shape that works
Start with the prose and two or three routes for the cases that come up daily. Add a route when somebody hits a situation the persona did not cover, rather than trying to enumerate everything up front. A persona with four good routes is used; one with twenty is maintained by nobody.
Updated 27 September 2026 · Article version 1