Building templates

Create a template from Templates → New template, or with ⌘+alt+T. You can start blank or generate one from a description.

Structure#

A template has a name, a description, and an ordered list of phases. Each phase holds:

• Tasks — title, description, priority, estimated hours, required skills, and order.
• Criteria — the gate at the end of the phase.

Everything is editable in place, and phases and tasks can be dragged to reorder.

Writing good phases#

The test for a phase is whether there is a decision at the end of it. If leaving the phase does not require anyone to agree to anything, it is a group of tasks, not a phase.

Four to six phases is the usual sweet spot. Beyond that, gates start getting waved through — which is worse than not having them, because now the record says a decision was made when it was not.

Writing tasks#

Template tasks are archetypes, not instructions. Keep them:

• Structural, not situational. "Run consumer taste panel" survives twenty projects; "Run taste panel with the Rotterdam group in March" does not.
• Estimated. Set estimated hours. Estimates carry over to every project made from the template and drive the workload charts.
• Skilled. Attach required skills. This is what makes automatic allocation work the moment a project is created.

Do not set deadlines in a template — dates only exist relative to a real start date, so projects get theirs from the schedule you build.

Writing criteria#

Criteria are the part of a template worth arguing about. They are the difference between a template that shapes work and one that merely lists it.

Each criterion should be something you would genuinely stop a project for, phrased so two people would agree on whether it has been met:

• ✅ "Stability data at 12 weeks reviewed and signed off by QA"
• ❌ "Quality checks done"

Every criterion in a template arrives incomplete on a new project. See gate criteria.

Generating a template with AI#

Describe the process — what it is for, roughly how it runs, what has to be true at each stage — and cadence. will produce a full template: phases in order, tasks with priorities and estimates, and criteria per gate.

It is at its best when your process is real but undocumented. It will give you a structure that is roughly right in about a minute, which is a far better editing target than an empty screen.

Maintaining templates#

Templates are living documents. The habit that pays:

1. Run a project.
2. At the retrospective, ask one question — what should have been a criterion?
3. Add it to the template.

Because projects are copies, this never disturbs work in flight. See templates are copies, not links.

Duplicating and deleting#

Duplicate a template when you need a variant — a lighter version for small projects, say — rather than adding conditional phases nobody knows whether to use.

Deleting a template does not affect projects already created from it.