Our Favorite Templates

By Tag Savage

We love our customers here at Quip, and we especially love seeing all the creative ways you use Quip to get things done. From Fox Sports's production team to Amazon Alexa's order fulfillment process, we've been continually inspired by the documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks you've come up with over the years.

So then, our Valentine's Day gift to you is a library of our favorite templates that customers have built over the years. They're clever, they're easy to use, and they're available right now. Enjoy.

xoxo, Quip

TEAM HOMEPAGE: So, who's on your team? What are their responsibilities? What are they working on right now? If you're like most teams, you've got that information scattered across a bunch of different documents that exist in a bunch of different places. When that information is impossible to find, it's not doing anyone any good.

So make it easy to find. Build a quick, handy, always-accessible team home page in Quip. It's not just useful for your team—it's even more useful to the teams you work with most. Your team works hard! Show them off!

With spots for a team directory, current top initiatives, links to important documents, and a coverage tracker, it's exactly the dynamic wiki you've been looking for.

PROJECT TRACKER WITH CALENDAR: Yes, there are lots of project management solutions out there, but few things match the flexibility and speed of a well-structured document. Don't get lost in the weeds of a complicated app. Build a document, share it out, and get cracking on your actual work.

This project tracker is replete with tools for assigning roles, staging out a project, summarizing its purpose, calendaring it out, setting deadlines, tracking tasks, keeping meeting notes, and doing good old-fashioned brainstorming. It's powerful as heck, but simple enough that anyone can jump right in. So why don't you jump right in and try it? Enjoy!

MEETING NOTESIf you've ever walked into a meeting and immediately forgotten everything you wanted to talk about, we feel ya. We're all juggling a bunch of projects in their heads. In status meetings, people get hung up on one of them and neglect to discuss all the rest. These templates are here to help.

Use project trackers to make sure everyone's projects are accounted for, and use checklists to keep everyone's next steps on track. Record meeting notes in each dated section for ready reference, and turn on the document outline to swiftly navigate through them. Why have a separate document for each meeting when you can have one comprehensive review that's always up-to-date?

Keep everything neat and tidy and ready for the next check-in. Free up your brain to actually focus and get stuff done.

APPROVAL WORKFLOWS: Your company is popping with fantastic ideas. So why do they all seem to die in committee? What you need is a firm-but-flexible approval process so people can take their brainstorms and turn them into reality.

Describe what you're trying to do, then lay out the necessary steps in a dynamic process bar. Use checklist to identify the necessary approvers for each step—when they've given you the go-ahead, they can just check themselves off. Outline the project's roles and responsibilties so everyone knows who to talk to about what. Get the greenlights you need to get amazing things done.

TEAM TASK LISTS: Everyone loves transparency and accountability, but everyone dreads the daily stand-up where they rattle off what they're up to for the next 8 hours. People just want to get back to work. They tune out, and those cross-currents of collaboration never really come to fruition. Enter the team task list.

The team task list takes the haze of a daily stand-up and makes it clear, digestible, and actionable. Everyone can see what everyone else is working on, when they expect to be done with it, and what they need to do to make it happen. It's always accessible to everyone, rather than disappearing into thin air once the meeting is over with. More often than not, projects change shape as they go, and in a simple document like this tasks can easily be reassigned, split apart, joined together, and discussed in comments and conversation. Deceptively simple, incredibly powerful.

TEAM OKRS: Are you a performance-driven org? Do you want to use OKRs to guide your company, but find that the big objectives get lost in a sea of tiny tickets and to-dos? Want a simple way to show everyone what everyone else is aiming for, and how well they're doing at it? Make a copy of this Team OKRs template and run with it.

Lay out each team's OKRs, then provide links the documents that'll help everyone understand them. Get teams working toward common goals, and get them out of their silos. Get people motivated to do their work, do it well, and make them feel proud when they hit 100%.

New hire onboarding: First day at the new job! You're excited, you're optimistic, you're...confused. It's a sea of unfamilair faces, brand new processes, and baffling paperwork. Who do you need to talk to about what? Which forms do you need to fill out? What's the wi-fi password, even?

Well, never underestimate the power of a friendly checklist—especially one with @mentions of all the documents and co-workers a newbie needs to know. Give your hires clarity and confidence so they can cut through all the disorienting stuff and get straight to the work that matters.

And more!: There are plenty more excellent customer templates where these came from, including ones that are specific to executive, marketing, HR, sales, design, and engineering teams. Take a look, take ’em for a test drive, and have a wonderful Valentine's Day ❤️