Hey everyone,
Wanted to introduce another project from the Lab. WowLang is a human-readable, machine-processable language for defining and governing how work flows across teams, tools, and time.
The Problem It Solves
Teams today operate across distributed tools, time zones, and disciplines. Yet the orchestration of that work, how we plan, collaborate, reflect, and iterate, is often scattered across calendars, documents, and intuition. There’s no shared, structured way to describe how work should happen.
We’ve felt this acutely ourselves. At Beach, our consulting engagements follow structured playbooks with phases, sessions, activities, and prep work. We found ourselves defining these workflows repeatedly, in slightly different ways, across different tools and documents. The knowledge of how to run a great engagement was trapped in people’s heads or buried in templates.
WowLang is our answer to that. A purpose-built language that captures the intent, structure, and governance of workflows in a format that’s both readable by humans and consumable by machines.
What It Looks Like
The specification is built around a simple hierarchy:
- Playbooks are the top-level container for a complete workflow or way of working
- Phases represent major stages or milestones within a playbook
- Sessions are time-boxed moments of collaboration or focus (a meeting, workshop, or sprint)
- Activities are discrete tasks, prep work, or output actions associated with a session
If you’re wondering what consumes WowLang specs at runtime, we’re building something for that too. More on Gleo soon.
Governance, Not Runtime
An important design choice: WowLang is a governance model, not a runtime system. It acts as scaffolding, a declarative description of how work should happen. Runtime systems (whether automated schedulers, facilitators, or interactive tools) consume WowLang specs to guide when, how, and by whom work is executed.
We intentionally separate prescription from execution. This makes WowLang flexible enough for lightweight guidance in creative teams and strict enough for repeatable operations in regulated environments.
Scheduling Intent
One area we’ve put real thought into is describing when things should happen without enforcing a rigid calendar. WowLang includes a structured schedule block with a recurrence object that covers type (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly), intervals, preferred days, and constraints. Authors can express scheduling intent clearly, whether loosely or prescriptively, while leaving actual execution to runtime systems.
What You Can Do With It
Some examples of where WowLang applies:
- Team playbooks: document and evolve how your team runs retrospectives, product reviews, or planning cycles
- Consulting engagements: define repeatable delivery frameworks that can be instantiated per client
- Onboarding programmes: describe structured learning journeys with phases and checkpoints
- AI-assisted facilitation: give AI copilots a structured understanding of how a workshop or meeting should flow
Tooling
We’ve built a parser, documentation engine, and playground. There’s also a VS Code extension for syntax support.
Inspiration
WowLang draws from configuration languages like Terraform, storytelling approaches like Markdown, and modular systems thinking. It prioritises clarity over cleverness, and guidance over control.
More detail on the project page: beach.io/labs/wowlang
This is in active development and we’re keen to hear from anyone who:
- Has workflows they’d want to express in a structured format
- Is building tools that orchestrate team processes
- Sees a connection between this and their own work
Let’s discuss!