On February 5, 2026, ReleaseOps Product Manager Jon Lind and Workflow Product Manager Lisa Holenstein hosted an interactive Platform Academy session that showed how to combine automated deployments with human oversight when necessary.
Playbooks are a foundational technology in designing ReleaseOps pipelines and provide a task-oriented, visual experience that guides release managers through deployment workflows using automation.
Attendees saw how to add conditional approvals to a Deployment Request assessment Playbook based on a Deployment Analyzer risk assessment. These same techniques can be leveraged to add other gating steps to stop the flow, such as waiting for a specific Story state, to your deployment processes.
