Product
Templates that teams actually copy
We looked at 41,288 template copies. Eight templates account for most of them, and none of the eight is what we expected.
Noor Haddad
Design lead
Jul 30, 2026 · 3 min read
When we launched the template gallery, we shipped 64 templates. We were proud of them. There was a product requirements doc with eleven sections, a quarterly planning workbook, a competitive analysis with a scoring rubric. They were thorough, opinionated and, it turns out, mostly ignored.
Last month we looked at every template copy made in Quill since launch: 41,288 of them across 1,140 workspaces. Eight templates account for 71% of all copies. Here is what they have in common, and what we changed because of it.
The eight
- Weekly review
- Stand-up meeting
- Onboarding checklist
- Decision log page
- Employee handbook
- Creative brief
- Incident write-up
- Product spec (the short one)
The planning workbook we spent three weeks on is number 39.
What the popular ones share
They are short
The median length of the top eight is 212 words before anyone types into them. The median of the bottom fifty is 860. Teams do not want a template that answers every question; they want one that asks the four that matter and gets out of the way. The short product spec has five headings. The long one had eleven, and was copied a quarter as often.
They come with a discussion already open
Six of the eight include a discussion with a close date, ready to use. The weekly review opens one called “What should we stop doing?” that closes on Friday. The incident write-up opens “What changes so this does not happen again?” Teams fill in the page because the question at the bottom gives the page a job.
They name an owner
Every popular template asks for an owner in its first line, before anything else. Templates without that line got abandoned halfway: copied, half-filled, never verified. Templates with it were verified within ninety days 82% of the time.
What we changed
We rewrote the gallery in June. It now has 31 templates instead of 64, and every one of them follows three rules we took straight from the data:
- No more than six headings, and a word count under 300 before anyone starts typing.
- An owner line at the top, filled with whoever copied it.
- One open question at the bottom, as a discussion with a sensible close date.
We also stopped writing example text inside templates. Grey placeholder paragraphs (“Describe the problem here”) were being left in about a third of published pages. Templates now use a single prompt line per heading, in the heading’s own question form, and the line disappears the moment you type.
The best template is the one that leaves room for the team to write the page they actually needed.
The surprise in the long tail
One template outside the top eight grew faster than any other this summer: the “How we work” page, a single page where a team writes its working hours, its time zones, how fast it answers messages and how it makes decisions. It started as an internal page of ours. Teams copy it in their first week, and it is the page new hires read first.
If you only copy one template, copy that one. It takes twenty minutes to fill in, and it answers the question every remote team gets asked most: how do you actually work here?
