At Beach, we believe the future of work requires not just better tools, but better ways to describe, coordinate, and evolve how work is done. WowLang is our answer to that challenge, a purpose-built language designed to capture the intent, structure, and governance of workflows in a format that's both human-readable and machine-processable.

Why We Built WowLang

Teams today operate across a landscape of 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. We built WowLang to introduce a shared, structured language for workflow design, enabling clarity, reusability, and automation at scale.

Core Philosophy

WowLang is designed as 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.

Hierarchical Model

The WowLang specification is built around a simple yet expressive hierarchy:

• Playbooks: The top-level container for a complete workflow or way of working.

• Phases: Major stages or milestones within a playbook.

• Sessions: Time-boxed moments of collaboration or focus (e.g. a meeting, workshop, or sprint).

• Activities: Discrete tasks, prep work, or output actions associated with a session.

This hierarchy enables nesting and reuse while keeping the language approachable for non-technical users.

Structured Scheduling with Governance-Driven Recurrence

A key aspect of WowLang is the ability to describe when things should happen - without enforcing a rigid calendar.

We've introduced a structured schedule block, which includes a recurrence object to describe timing intent. This includes:

• type: The recurrence type (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.)

• on: Specific days (e.g. "Monday", "First Friday")

• preferredTime: The ideal time of day (e.g. "10:00 AM")

• timezone: For consistent global coordination

• minInterval / maxInterval: Guardrails to define acceptable cadence

• until: Optional end date

• exclude: Dates to skip (e.g. holidays)

These fields allow authors to express scheduling intent clearly - whether loosely defined or highly prescriptive - while leaving actual execution to runtime systems.

Designed for Tooling and Integration

WowLang files are parsed into structured objects (mirrored in TypeScript interfaces) that can be used by:

• Workflow engines

• Scheduling assistants

• Calendar integrations

• No-code tools

• Analytics systems

We’ve built the language to be extensible and forward-compatible, supporting future concepts like dependencies, conditions, role-based access, and tool automation.

Use Cases

• Team Playbooks: Document and evolve how your team runs retrospectives, product reviews, or planning cycles.

• Onboarding Journeys: Provide new hires with structured, progressive sessions and actions, without hardcoding dates.

• Product Development Workflows: Codify repeatable design and delivery phases for consistent outcomes.

• Client Engagement Models: Create standard processes for discovery, delivery, and feedback loops across engagements.

A Human-Centered DSL

WowLang is inspired by configuration languages like Terraform, storytelling approaches like markdown, and modular systems thinking. It prioritises clarity over cleverness, and guidance over control.

Whether you’re a product lead creating rituals, a facilitator designing workshops, or a platform engineer integrating AI copilots with calendars, WowLang gives you a structured way to express how work should flow—and leaves room for the messiness of real life.

WowLang is currently in active development, with a parser, documentation engine, and playground in place. If you’re building tools for orchestration, facilitation, or automation - we’d love to collaborate.