AI Guides › Prompting
Writing A Prompt Template You Can Actually Hand To A Colleague
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
A prompt that works well for you usually has gaps you don't notice, because
you fill them from memory without writing them down — which document you
meant, what "the usual format" means, which of three similar projects
you're talking about. Hand that same prompt to a colleague and it fails,
not because the prompt was badly written, but because half of what made it
work was never actually in it.
The rule: a template only works once every blank in it says what to type,
not what you happened to mean the last time you used it.
The mechanism: the handoff template
- Start from a working prompt — one you've already used successfully,
not one written from scratch for this purpose.
- Mark every place where the wording changes each time you use it.
Convert each into an explicit placeholder, in square brackets:
[client name], [date range], [the document being summarised].
- For every placeholder, add one line saying what belongs there and one
worked example. Not just the label — an actual instance, so there's no
ambiguity about format or level of detail.
- Strip out anything that only makes sense because you were there —
references to "the file we discussed," a conversation history the
colleague doesn't have, a shared assumption about which version is
current.
- Test it cold. Hand it to the colleague with no verbal explanation
and watch whether they can fill it in and get a usable result without
coming back to ask you a question. Every question they ask is a
placeholder or an instruction you haven't actually written down yet.
| Placeholder |
What goes here |
Example |
[client name] |
The client's name as it appears on the account |
"Riverford Wholesale" |
[date range] |
Start and end date, or "last full calendar month" |
"1–30 September 2026" |
[source document] |
What the colleague should paste in or attach |
The signed statement of work |
What to skip
Skip templating anything you or others will only use once — the effort of
generalising a prompt only pays off for something reused repeatedly. Skip
trying to template the parts that genuinely require judgement; if a step
depends on someone deciding "is this good enough to send," write that in as
an instruction to use their judgement, not as something a placeholder can
capture.
Guardrails
- A template is a living document, not a one-off. Revisit it when the task
it supports changes, or when the model behind it changes enough that the
old wording no longer produces the same kind of result.
- Handing over a template doesn't hand over the judgement needed to use its
output well — the colleague still needs to review what comes back, the
same as you would.
- If only you can successfully run the template, it isn't one yet — the
cold test in step 5 is the actual check, not something to skip because
it worked when you tried it yourself.
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