Staying organized is the key to streamlining your workflow and shipping better products. Since engineers work on multiple complex tasks, manage dozens of tickets at once, and have to regularly document and reflect on their work — staying on top of everything requires the right tools.
Here are seven essential templates to help you manage, track, and document your work. They offer practical solutions for mapping your projects, building a valuable report, presenting your solutions, or product updates — and even improving by reflecting on your or your team's failures and successes.
Together they're a complete management solution, helping you elevate your workflow and achieve better results.
Technical post-mortem
Conducting a technical post-mortem helps your team transform challenges into opportunities for growth and learning. But to really make an impact, you need to do more than document the incident. In a good post-mortem, the team digs deeper into each issue, discovers its root causes, and learns valuable lessons for the future.
This technical post-mortem template makes it easy to conduct an effective step-by-step post-mortem. It's structured to help you gain insights as you fill it out, as it prompts you to not only describe the issue — but reflect on its impact and causes, document any learnings, and decide on the next steps. This well-organized doc can also serve as an incident report that you can share with the stakeholders to help them understand what went wrong, and how you managed to fix it.
You can use smart links to embed your incident tickets from Github, Jira, or Linear in the post-mortem. Smart links display important information about tickets like the title, description, status, and assignee, so your team can get a quick overview of the issues without the need to describe them in detail in your doc.
↗️ Give this technical post-mortem template a go.
Software architecture proposal
Creating a good architecture proposal is about presenting a clear and engaging vision for your project. While there is no single structure to fit every team's needs, a good template will help get you started and make sure you cover all the details.
This architecture proposal template lets you turn your vision into a clear and detailed guide through the project — from an overview of the problems you're trying to solve, to code level examples. This way a client, or a wider team, can understand the plan and feel confident about its potential.
It's easy to include code examples in your proposal by simply inserting a code box in the doc.
↗️ Try the software architecture proposal template.
Engineering retrospective
When done right, retrospectives can be a game-changer for your team as they help identify, and solve workflow issues, improve efficiency, and encourage problem-solving.
But to actually make an impact, retrospectives have to be more than a quick discussion on what went wrong. They need a good structure to ensure that all issues are covered, achievements are acknowledged, and the learnings lead to actionable next steps that can actually make a difference.
That's where this engineering retrospective template can really help. It's built with the needs of engineering teams in mind, to help you make sure your next retro covers all the bases — and actually improves your team's workflow.
This template allows you to easily document all aspects of your last sprint, with handy tables for key metrics. With your numbers and your team's insights in place — it's easy to decide on what went right or wrong, highlight any follow-up tasks, and make sure the team learned valuable lessons.
↗️ Take the engineering retrospective template for a spin.
Engineering dashboard
Keeping your tasks, epics, sprint timelines, and notes in one place can really streamline your workflow — making sure everything you're working on is easy to reach and track.
With this engineering dashboard template, you can build a workspace that has everything you need. It's structured to track your assigned, backlogged, and completed tasks, stories, epics, and sprints— helping you keep your tasks organized.
This template is easy to customize, so if you work with other task types — you can adjust each section to your requirements, rearrange the doc's structure, or add new sections and categories.
With pages and cards, you can keep details about your tasks and any other notes in the same doc without cluttering up your workspace. You can also embed roadmaps or Gantt charts from other apps like Figjam, to show a visual timeline of your sprints or projects.
Finally, you can add links to issues from platforms like Linear or Github that will automatically display descriptions and key information so team members or collaborators can get an overview without leaving the dashboard.
↗️ Try the engineering dashboard template.
Engineering report template
Writing reports is part of the workflow of almost every engineer. And for a good reason — properly documenting your work is crucial in successfully managing your projects. It also helps to communicate your project’s objectives, methodologies, and progress to stakeholders — and keep track of your progress.
Writing reports can be time-consuming — so it's a good idea to start with a template. This comprehensive engineering report template covers all the elements necessary for a complete report — from project lifecycle to any issues and project outcomes. This way, you don't have to worry about coming up with a structure for your doc, and save a significant amount of time.
This template is also fully customizable — allowing you to easily remove sections you don't need, expand on existing ones, or add new ones, depending on your needs. Make sure to also embed smart links for your reported issues.
↗️ Give the engineering report template a try.
Product roadmap
Product roadmap is an essential project management tool — helping you improve the organization and transparency of your projects. It's a crucial doc for executing a successful project, as it outlines not only any completed or planned tasks — but also the vision, direction, and priorities for the project. It helps the team stay aligned by gaining a shared understanding of their responsibilities and priorities for the upcoming quarters.
This product roadmap template is structured with blocks and toggles to help you structure and expand on your current projects while keeping your doc organized.
You can track your tasks for each quarter in handy tables, set deadlines with the date feature, and label the status and priority of your tasks.
Expert instructions guide you in creating your roadmap, from outlining your projects to building a roadmap overview — and even helping you create and embed a project timeline from Figjam.
↗️ Try the product roadmap template.
Release notes
Release notes are a way to share new product features with your users, stakeholders, or a wider team. They keep everyone informed, articulating major features, fixes, and improvements. It's good to put your release notes in a well-structured doc that the public can easily navigate and understand — and this is where having a template can really make a difference.
This release notes template is structured to help you communicate your updates clearly and effectively.
You can highlight the latest release with a card, organize previous releases into separate pages, and take advantage of Craft’s styling to make your update easy to digest and understand — so you can be sure your release notes make an impact.
↗️ Give the release notes template a go.
Discover more templates for engineers in Craft.
Have you got an idea for a template for engineers? Submit it via this form and we might feature it in the official Craft template gallery!
