Senior marketing operators distilled into 25 Claude Code skills that read your brand context and ship the work alongside you. Forty-six playbooks across brand, demand, content, ops and productivity. Free to read, free to install, refreshed as the models shift.
New to AI? Read the prompting 101 or the Cowork setup primer.
They draft a meta description in ChatGPT. They Midjourney a stock-photo replacement. They sit through webinars about agents and walk away with a list of tools they'll never actually wire up. The pipeline still looks like 2020 with a faster pen.
The operators a step ahead are using AI as a team. Briefs that self-iterate. Content systems that run themselves. Pipelines that improve every time a new model ships. The difference isn't talent or budget, it's having seen the workflow written down with all the failure modes labelled.
The Lens is a curated reference for senior marketers. Each entry is a complete AI workflow with the prompts, the eval gates, the failure modes and a worked example walked through end to end. No ninety-minute video that loses relevance the moment a new model lands.
Every playbook is shipped as a step-by-step workflow with click-paths through the tools you already use, copy-paste prompts, downloadable templates and a worked example walked through end to end. No "what if you tried" content, only workflows you can run today.
Prompts are the easy part. Each entry ships with the quality checks the workflow should pass before output goes live, the common ways the workflow breaks, and the signals that tell you which is happening. Swap the model, re-run the checks, ship.
When a frontier model lands, the affected workflows get re-tested and the entries get updated. If a model change breaks a workflow the entry is annotated with what changed and what the new shape looks like. The library stays current instead of going stale.
Filter by channel, by brand stage, by output type, by model. You're not reading the library cover to cover, you're pulling the playbook you need for the brief on your desk this week.
The Lens is 46 playbooks. Most readers don't need 46, they need the right one for the work in front of them. Match your situation below and you'll land on the right starter.
Positioning audit, voice extraction, message house. Five to ten working days end to end.
POSITIONING AUDIT →Eval-gated drafting feeding a social factory. Drafts pass voice, fact and originality gates before a human sees them.
EVAL-GATED DRAFTING →Brief-to-ship pipeline. Structured intake, weekly triage, weekly shipping cadence. Replaces ten tools.
BRIEF-TO-SHIP →Channel-mix simulator with reach-curve fitting. Walk into the meeting with three scenarios and the maths.
CHANNEL-MIX SIMULATOR →Daily briefing pipeline. Calendar plus inbox plus Slack plus CRM stitched into a five-minute morning brief.
DAILY BRIEFING →The "Start here" page has the by-situation lookup table, plus the four starting paths and the install path.
FULL GUIDE →The library is organised by what you're trying to ship, not by tool. Pull what you need, ignore the rest.
Positioning audits, naming sprints, brand-voice extraction, endurance brand voice, message houses, tagline systems, founder vs institutional voice.
7 playbooks · growing →
Channel-mix, race-day demand, ambassador programmes, event sponsorship, retail partner programmes, subscription / membership, direct-to-coach, lifecycle journeys, CEP research.
11 playbooks · growing →
SEO clusters, eval-gated drafting, earned-media pitches, social factories, training-content engines, race-result automation, segment b-roll, the AI-news pipeline.
9 playbooks · growing →
Brief-to-ship pipelines, gear-launch sequences, end-of-season inventory, crash-replacement programmes, brand guardrails as code, customer content rights, evaluation frameworks, hiring.
9 playbooks · growing →
Daily briefings, email triage, meeting prep, call follow-up, pipeline rollups, OKR synthesis. The personal-assistant workflows that turn Cowork into a real second brain.
10 playbooks · growing →
Every playbook, every skill, the capability reference and the AI-news pipeline read free, no signup needed. Subscribe with your email if you want a heads-up when new entries ship and existing ones get refreshed against new frontier models.
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What we do with your data. Or skip the email entirely and read the library at /lens/library any time.
The playbook on this site explains the work. The skill in the
plugin is the work. Install it once with two commands, then ask
Claude to set up The Lens. The onboarding skill installs the
right Cowork plugins alongside, finds your existing brand
documentation, writes a structured .lens/ workspace
and recommends a starter. Twenty to forty minutes to a working
setup, then every skill below runs against your actual data.
/plugin marketplace add Scylark/manual-focus
/plugin install the-lens@manual-focus
set up the lens26 skills live · 24 workflow skills · 1 onboarding orchestrator · 1 video-render utility · Source on GitHub ↗
The Lens is curated by Manual Focus, a senior marketing practice working with endurance brands and AI-native operators, with a rotating cast of contributors from the Foundry collective. The playbooks are the methodology that practice produced. The shapes, the prompts, the eval gates, the failure modes seen go wrong over years of senior marketing work and designed around.
As engagements run and patterns prove themselves, illustrative examples in each entry are replaced with real ones and the eval shapes with what those runs actually produced. When a workflow gets retired the entry says so and explains why. When a frontier model release changes the result of a workflow, the affected entries get annotated and updated.
Yes. Every playbook, every skill, the capability reference and the AI-news pipeline. No paywall. No credit card. We ask for your email so we can let you know when new entries ship and existing ones get refreshed, but the library itself is fully open at /lens/library even without signing up.
The Lens is the brand. Senior marketers who use the playbooks sometimes find that work emerges that fits a Manual Focus engagement, whether Fractional CMO, Strategic Advisor, Build and Hand Over, or the AI product. A free, opinionated, regularly updated library is how we earn the right to that conversation. If you never need us, that's also fine.
A course is content you consume once. The Lens is a reference library you keep coming back to. Pull a playbook the day a brief lands, swap the model when a new one ships, hand a workflow to a junior with the eval harness intact. The shape is closer to a Bloomberg Terminal than a Udemy unit.
46 live across the five stacks of Brand, Demand, Content, Ops and Productivity, plus 26 runnable skills installable as a Claude Code plugin (24 workflow skills, the setup-the-lens onboarding orchestrator, and a video-script-to-heygen utility for turning playbooks into avatar videos via the HeyGen API). The capability reference page grades what AI can actually do this quarter. New entries ship regularly as new patterns prove themselves in live work.
Yes. Pass the URLs around. Install the plugin on every team member's Claude Code. The library is meant to be used by working teams, not gate-kept.
When a frontier model lands, the affected entries get re-tested and annotated with what changed, which prompts got updated and whether the workflow still ships in the same shape. If your version is running fine, you don't need to touch it. Subscribers get notified when an entry they would care about has been refreshed.
For teams that can run the playbooks themselves, yes, this is the leverage without the cost of a Fractional CMO. For others it sits alongside one of the services as a way to keep the in-house team sharp between engagements.
The Lens compounds when used, not when read. Start with the guide if you're new, or jump straight to the library if you know what you're after.