A template is defined by Oxford Dictionary as “something that serves as a model for others to copy”.
Templates not only help to ease your workload but they also help increase efficiency and decrease the sense of overwhelm that can come along with starting anything new.
You can think of a template as a way to deduplicate efforts by capturing what has worked in the past for yourself and your team. Templates also help to keep workflows streamlined and consistent, time and time again.
Say yes to less work—with Trello Templates simply duplicate your team’s workflow, not your workload.
When Should A Workflow Become A Template?
So how do you get in the habit of looking over the work you’ve done and deciding what should be templated? How do you collaborate with your team to “templatize” the best workflows out there by capturing what has worked in the past?
One of the best methods for creating a template workflow for well, making templates, is to ask yourself a series of questions before getting started with any project:
- Have I done this before?
- Has someone else done this?
- How often do I do this?
- Will other people need this?
- Can the community benefit from this?
If you answered ‘yes’ to more than one of the questions above, chances are you and/or your team could benefit from the creation of a template for the given problem at hand. All Trello users can create free public templates to share their expertise and workflows with the community. Business Class and Enterprise teams can also create unlimited private, team-visible, and public templates. Team templates are a great way to standardize processes across your team, and avoid the need to reinvent the wheel with each board setup.
How To Create A Trello Template
- Create a Trello board
- Set it up in the way you’d like it to appear as a template
- Add any co-creators for your template to your board
- From the board’s sidebar menu, go to Menu > More and select “Make template”
- Convert board to template
- Boom! Your board is now a template with all the fixins’
We’ve amassed quite a collection from within our teams at Trello and Atlassian, as well as within the greater Trello community. You can even look through some of the most common workflows in the Trello community template gallery. Here are some of the replicable workflows which have led to templates (you can copy these for free!):
Employee Onboarding
Create a smooth and reliable process for every new team member. Keep an always up-to-date employee manual tailored to your team’s needs that can easily be edited and reorganized in a drag and drop format.
1:1 Meetings
Many people have 1:1 meetings with individuals across their organization. Streamlining a process to set these up can save time, frustration, and help with accountability. Here is one where you and your teammate can add agenda items throughout the week as they pop into your heads, track what’s been discussed, and assign follow-up actions.
GTM Board
Setting up a repeatable format for future marketing launches will have your team singing your praises. Get everything organized into a neat workflow—have all the necessary info in one place and show the status of the campaign from a bird’s eye view.
Team Retrospectives
Retrospectives are a great way to evaluate team performance over a previous sprint or iteration. In retrospectives, the team covers things they’d like to continue doing, things that could use improvement, and things they’d like to stop doing.
Health Monitors
These are something you can (and should do!) with your team regularly. They help make sure everybody is on the same page and can mitigate problems before they get too big. Use this template for your team to assess your team against the eight attributes most commonly found among healthy teams. At the end of each Health Monitor session, you'll identify strengths to exploit as well as challenge areas to grow.
Share The Knowledge
Trello Templates allow us all to focus on what matters: getting things done, faster and better. By being able to replicate processes that have worked for either your team or another organization, sharing better ways to work has never been more accessible.
If you have a workflow that you feel could benefit others in the Trello community we would love to hear from you! Submit a template here for a chance to be featured in the Trello community template gallery.
Good or bad, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on Twitter (@trello)!
