One template per document a product team writes
A template is a type plus a starting body. Several templates can start documents of one type: prd and rfc are both specs, adr and deprecation are both decisions. notdocs templates lists every one with its type and a line on what it is for; the new-document dialog shows the same list. A repository adds or replaces templates with files in docs/_templates/, see Documents.
notdocs docs new docs/specs/search.md --title "Search" --template prd
notdocs docs new docs/postmortems/2026-09-16-api.md --title "API outage" --template postmortemThe templates below are grouped by the stage of a product where each is written. Early on, prd, rfc, launch and runbook cover most of the value; the rest earn their place as the team grows.
Discovery
| Template | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
problem | brief | A problem statement or opportunity brief: the pain, who has it, the evidence |
competitive | report | Market and competitive analysis, exportable to Word and PDF |
Definition
| Template | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
prd | spec | Product requirements: users, stories, scope, out of scope, success metrics |
persona | persona | Who a user is: goals, frustrations, how they work today |
journey | page | A journey map: stages, actions, thoughts, pain points |
pricing | spec | Pricing and packaging: tiers, limits and the reasoning |
A roadmap is the roadmap.md page notdocs init writes, a query block over the tasks.
Design
| Template | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
research | report | UX research findings: method, participants, findings, recommendations |
accessibility | spec | Accessibility requirements against WCAG |
Engineering
| Template | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
rfc | spec | A technical design: context, goals, design, alternatives, rollout |
adr | decision | An architecture decision record with the options that were weighed |
decision | decision | The shorter record: context, decision, consequences |
threat-model | spec | Security threat model and data-handling review |
infrastructure | spec | Environments, pipeline, infrastructure as code, access |
standards | page | Engineering standards and the definition of done |
Launch
| Template | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
launch | launch | The launch checklist an agent or a person works through |
release | release | Release notes for one version |
battlecard | playbook | Sales positioning, objections and answers |
brief | brief | A marketing brief: objective, audience, positioning, messages |
playbook | playbook | A support playbook: questions, answers, when to escalate |
terms, privacy, nda, dpa, sla | the same | The legal set, as business documents that export to Word and PDF |
Operations
| Template | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
runbook | runbook | How to operate a service and fix its common failures |
oncall | page | The on-call rotation, severity levels and escalation |
slo | slo | A service level objective, its indicators and alerts |
disaster-recovery | runbook | Backups, recovery objectives and the recovery steps |
postmortem | postmortem | An incident report: timeline, impact, root cause, follow-ups |
user-guide | page | A customer-facing guide or onboarding page |
Growth
| Template | Type | What it is |
|---|---|---|
metrics | page | Metric definitions: north star, activation, retention, churn |
experiment | experiment | An experiment brief: hypothesis, variants, metric, result |
feedback | page | A customer feedback log and its themes |
quarterly-review | meeting | A quarterly product review or retrospective |
deprecation | decision | Retiring a feature: who is affected, timeline, migration |