On behalf of one of our customers, I would like to suggest an enhancement for our playbook questions feature. Currently, when a user edits a playable question (even adding a space will trigger), all previously entered data associated with that question is lost. This can be quite frustrating for users who want to make minor adjustments without losing important data they’ve already collected.
Suggested Improvement:
We propose that HubSpot introduces the ability to edit playbook questions without losing the data of the previously entered information. This would allow users to make necessary changes or corrections to their questions while retaining all the valuable data that has been collected up to that point.
I’m pretty shocked that this functionality exists. I initially created a community post with more information that you can view here: HubSpot Community - Re: Data deleted from Playbooks after edit - HubSpot Community. The fact that a Playbook is intended to capture and store content, but the content assocaited with a question will get wiped from ALL Playbooks if that question is at all edited is baffling. I can’t even think of a use case where this would be helpful. I wouldn’t recommend touching Playbooks until this is fixed, and really hoping it does soon.
Absolutely criminal that this actually exists, and had I not been searching for something unrelated that led me to this post, I would never have known about it. Very worrying.
The good news is that a Playbook can be cloned to make those changes and the previous version can be unpublished to enforce using the new version. That said, there isn’t a “Used In” section in a Playbook’s settings like properties to go update a workflow so that needle in a haystack is gonna be fun to track down. I’d also imagine that would create many unpublished versions over time potentially hitting platform subscription limits if they exist.
We are in Clean Up Freeze at the moment and I’m so glad I found this before I started deleting old versions of Playbooks. Based on how HubSpot currently functions in other product areas, I would expect the engagement the Playbook created (call, note, etc) to be retained, as well as any property changes, if the Playbook itself was deleted. For example, if we change a workflow or delete it, all the engagements it might have created in the past are retained. Playbooks should be the same.
This may be a mute point now since Process Guides are coming out, but we won’t start migrating to those until at least 6 months post general release.
I’m Winnie, the Product Manager for HubSpot Playbooks.
Thank you for taking the time to share this idea. We genuinely read and consider everything submitted on the communtity forum.
After review, we don’t have plans to build this right now. This is actually something we find interesting, but we have higher-priority work in flight that we need to see through first. It’s on our radar for future consideration.
A question that pops up for me is: if you were to change the question entirely, say instead of “What’s the prospect’s pain point?” to “What’s the prospect’s current tech stack?” would you expect that draft data to be deleted?
What’s the most common reason for why you’d edit a question after it’s been published? That would help us understand which use case we might want to optimize for by default: deleting draft note data or keeping it.
We revisit our roadmap regularly, and customer ideas like this one do influence what we prioritize. Please continue to leave comments and upvotes. I usually reach back out on the Community Forum and will DM folks that have commented to jump on calls to learn more about the use case, or to recruit for early beta testing.