Templates

If I’m honest, I still maintain an almost ✨ magical ✨ belief in templates. Yet I know templates are only as “good” as they are useful. To that end, here are some of my favorite templates, which I’m sharing for your inspiration and adaptation. The best template is adaptable, clearly optimized for your use case, and is the one used in reality.

Decision Log

Pull Request Template

1:1s Notion Template

Self-Reflection Tool

Decision Log

• Great for cross-functional use to keep track of key decisions and understand the reasoning and tradeoffs involved.
• Ideal for distributed and global teams working remotely
• Inspired by the great Melanie Richards and Hilary Wein with some adaptations of my own.
• Formatted in Markdown but you can ask an AI tool to adapt the formatting. For example, add to Notion to ask Notion AI to adapt it using Notion’s table/database features.

Pull request template

• Disclaimer: I’ll adapt pull request templates to be more effective given the organization, collaborators, and project. But this is a go-to template you can adapt from. Noting that I want clear information on target shipping and dependencies without conceding that the PR author always gets to decide exactly when a PR ships.

1:1s Notion template

This template gives you space to track the following:

• 1:1 meeting notes with your manager with the option to add custom tags for topics so you can prioritize your synchronous time together
• A big picture view of the quarter with quarterly themes/goals noted
• A space to track career conversations with your manager

On the left of this Notion database, you and your manager can add new topics with details, clear ownership, and custom tags that either of you can add. I like to start of the meeting by asking if there are other things they wanted to add for synchronous discussion. Then I check-in on timeliness of any of their topics and based on that prioritize our topics. We also review any open action items from last time.

Scroll to the right and find space for your own notes, your manager’s notes, and follow-up action tracking.

COMING SOON

I’m still working out the best way to share this template so stay tuned! Also, let me know if you’re interested in this by adding a comment below.

Self-reflection template

This self-reflection template is one I found after joining a training by Paloma Medina. Matt Billings, an Engineering manager, took this framework and created a Google spreadsheet that you can copy and use on your own. It gives you space to rate how important each area is to you and then how much you sense that area of need is being met. You can learn more in Matt Billings’ original Medium post.

This reflection exercise is meant to help you identify what’s most important to you and your career at this time.

This template is a Google spreadsheet developed by Matt Billings that is based on Paloma Medina’s BICEPS model that breaks down well-being into 5 categories:

• Belonging
• Improvement
• Choice
• Equality/ Fairness
• Significance

Learn more about this framework from Paloma Medina’s professional coaching site.

Recommended use

I recommend using this tool on a regular cadence (yearly, quarterly, or monthly) to help track change over time. This can also be helpful at pinpointing what you may want to prioritize next in your career journey.

Keeping Stephen Covey’s framework on the circles of influence and control in mind have given me the most clarity on next steps based on this reflection exercise.