SecondPen.ai132 document templates that top operators use
The formats behind well-run companies: Amazon's six-pager and PR/FAQ, Google's design doc and blameless postmortem, the Harvard résumé, the Diátaxis tutorial. Each page gives the format's sections, where it comes from, and the criteria a tough reader scores it on. Open any one in SecondPen.ai and the blank is written with the guidance in place; when your draft is ready, the Critic scores it against the same criteria.
Strategy & planning
- Amazon 6-Pager (narrative memo)any major proposal or strategy review
- Amazon PR/FAQ (Working Backwards)new products or features
- Amazon OP1 / Annual operating planannual team plans and headcount asks
- Salesforce V2MOMMarc Benioff's alignment framework, used company-wide at Salesforce since 1999
- OKRs (Intel / Google)Andy Grove at Intel; popularized by John Doerr at Google
- Strategy kernel (Rumelt)Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy (2011)
- Playing to Win strategy cascadeA.G. Lafley and Roger Martin at P&G (2013)
- Lean Canvas / Business Model CanvasAlexander Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas; Ash Maurya's startup adaptation
- Tenets documentAmazon team tenets — principles that resolve recurring debates
Operating cadence & reporting
- Amazon WBR (Weekly Business Review)Amazon's weekly metrics review; a deck of charts showing trailing 6 weeks and 12 months with YoY lines, walked page by page
- Monthly / Quarterly Business Review (MBR/QBR)Standard executive review cadence at Amazon, Microsoft, and most SaaS companies
- Monthly investor updateY Combinator / Silicon Valley norm for startup founders
- Board pre-read memoBoard governance best practice (narrative pre-read sent 3–5 days before the meeting)
- Annual shareholder letterWarren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway letters; Jeff Bezos's 1997 Amazon letter
- Metric definition sheetData-governance practice underpinning WBR-style reviews
- 5-15 weekly reportAttributed to Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia: takes 15 minutes to write, 5 minutes to read
Product management
- Amazon 2-pager / 1-pagerAmazon's short narrative for smaller decisions or early ideas before a full 6-pager
- Product Requirements Document (PRD)Industry-standard spec; modern lean versions from Marty Cagan (SVPG) and teams like Figma, Intercom, and Asana
- Product opportunity assessmentMarty Cagan, SVPG — ten questions to answer before building
- Shape Up pitchBasecamp's Shape Up (Ryan Singer, 2019)
- Opportunity Solution TreeTeresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits (2021)
- User story with acceptance criteriaConnextra format ("As a … I want … so that …"), INVEST criteria (Bill Wake), Gherkin Given/When/Then (BDD)
- Product launch plan / GTM briefStandard product marketing practice (tiered launches used at Atlassian, HubSpot, Google)
- Now / Next / Later roadmapJanna Bastow (ProdPad); outcome-based alternative to date-driven Gantt roadmaps
- Release notes / changelogKeep a Changelog convention with Semantic Versioning
Engineering & architecture
- Google design docGoogle engineering culture; the canonical pre-implementation review doc
- RFC (Request for Comments)IETF RFCs; modern engineering template from the Rust RFC process, also used at Uber, Sourcegraph, and HashiCorp
- Architecture Decision Record (ADR)Michael Nygard (2011); now standard in ThoughtWorks Tech Radar "adopt" practices
- Operational Readiness Review (ORR)AWS Well-Architected; Amazon's pre-launch checklist distilled from past COEs
- Threat model (STRIDE)Microsoft SDL; STRIDE by Loren Kohnfelder and Praerit Garg
- Runbook / playbookGoogle SRE and PagerDuty incident-response practice
- SLO documentGoogle SRE book and workbook
- C4 architecture overviewSimon Brown's C4 model (Context, Containers, Components, Code)
- READMEOpen-source convention (standard-readme, GitHub)
Incidents, problem-solving & learning
- Blameless postmortemGoogle SRE book, "Postmortem Culture"; adopted by Atlassian, PagerDuty, and Etsy
- Amazon COE (Correction of Error)Amazon/AWS post-incident process, reviewed weekly by leadership
- After Action Review (AAR)U.S. Army, 1970s; widely adopted in business and emergency management
- A3 problem-solving reportToyota Production System; one A3-size sheet following PDCA
- Pre-mortemGary Klein, Harvard Business Review (2007); endorsed by Daniel Kahneman
- Team retrospectiveAgile / Scrum; formats include Start-Stop-Continue and the 4Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed for)
Decisions & executive communication
- Decision memo (one-way / two-way door)Jeff Bezos's 2015 shareholder letter on Type 1 (irreversible) vs. Type 2 (reversible) decisions
- RAPID decision rolesBain & Company (Rogers & Blenko, HBR 2006)
- DACI decision docIntuit; popularized by Atlassian's Team Playbook
- Pyramid Principle / SCQA memoBarbara Minto at McKinsey, The Pyramid Principle (1987)
- BLUF emailU.S. military writing standard (Bottom Line Up Front)
- Five-paragraph operations order (OPORD / SMEAC)U.S. Army and Marine Corps; commander's intent lets teams adapt when plans break
- Ghost deck / storyline (action titles)McKinsey, BCG, and Bain slide practice — the deck's argument is readable from slide titles alone
- One-page executive briefCommon across government (White House and cabinet memos) and Fortune 500 staff work
Finance, investing & fundraising
- Sequoia pitch deckSequoia Capital's published "Writing a Business Plan" guidance
- Y Combinator applicationYC's application questions; widely used as a founder-clarity exercise
- Venture investment memoVC partnership practice; Bessemer Venture Partners publishes historical memos (Shopify, LinkedIn, Pinterest)
- Buy-side stock pitch / investment thesisHedge-fund and value-investing practice (Sohn and Value Investors Club write-ups)
- Business caseCorporate finance standard (HM Treasury Five Case Model; Fortune 500 capital requests)
- Financial model assumptions bookInvestment banking and FP&A modeling standards (FAST standard)
Go-to-market, marketing & sales
- Positioning canvas (April Dunford)April Dunford, Obviously Awesome (2019)
- Positioning statement (Geoffrey Moore)Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm (1991)
- Messaging framework (message house)PR and product-marketing standard
- Creative briefAdvertising agency standard (the "single-minded proposition" tradition from Ogilvy and others)
- Competitive battlecardSales enablement practice (Klue, Crayon, Gartner)
- MEDDICC deal reviewDeveloped at PTC in the 1990s (Dick Dunkel, Jack Napoli); standard in enterprise sales
- Mutual action planEnterprise B2B sales practice; shared close plan with the buyer
- Customer case studyB2B marketing standard (Challenge → Solution → Results)
Research & discovery
- User research planUX research practice (Nielsen Norman Group, Google UX)
- Customer interview guide (The Mom Test)Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test (2013)
- Research readout / insights reportUX and market research practice
- Jobs-to-be-Done analysisClayton Christensen; switch interviews and Forces of Progress from Bob Moesta
- Experiment / A/B test briefOnline controlled experiment practice (Ron Kohavi at Microsoft; Booking.com)
- PersonaAlan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (1999)
- Customer journey mapService design practice (Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO)
People & leadership
- Role scorecard (Topgrading / Who)Geoff Smart and Randy Street, Who: The A Method for Hiring (ghSMART, 2008)
- Structured interview kitGoogle re:Work structured interviewing research; Laszlo Bock, Work Rules! (2015)
- 30-60-90 day planMichael Watkins, The First 90 Days (2003)
- Promotion packetGoogle and Meta promotion-committee practice
- Performance feedback (SBI)Center for Creative Leadership's Situation-Behavior-Impact model
- Personal user manual (Manager README)Popularized in tech leadership circles in the 2010s (the "user manual for me" practice)
- One-on-one docAndy Grove, High Output Management (1983): the 1:1 is the report's meeting
- Org design proposalOrganizational design practice (Galbraith's Star Model; Team Topologies by Skelton & Pais)
Careers & job search
- Reverse-chronological résumé (Harvard OCS)any application where the recent record is the strongest case
- XYZ résumé bullets (Google)rewriting an existing résumé's bullets, or a résumé for a data-driven employer
- Executive résumédirector level and above, board applications, and career changers with a long record
- Academic CVacademic positions, postdoctoral fellowships, grants and tenure files
- Federal résumé (USAJOBS)any application through USAJOBS or a federal agency
- Europass CVapplications across EU member states and for programmes that require it
- Cover letterany application that accepts a letter, and cold approaches to a hiring manager
- LinkedIn headline & Aboutanyone being found by recruiters or clients
- Professional bioconference programmes, company websites, bylines, panels and press
- Brag documenta running record of accomplishments that feeds performance reviews, promotion packets and résumé updates
Writing & publishing
- Engineering blog post (how we built it)a launch, a migration, an outage write-up or a performance win
- Essay (Paul Graham)an idea you want to work out in public
- Op-ed (The OpEd Project)an opinion piece for a newspaper, a trade publication or a company blog taking a position
- Listiclea roundup, a set of tips, tools or lessons that do not need to be read in order
- Tutorial (Diátaxis)a getting-started guide or a "build your first X" post
- How-to guide (Diátaxis)"How to do X in Y" posts and internal guides
- Explainer"What is X and why does it matter", a concept, a controversy or a system explained for a curious reader
- Launch announcement posta product, feature or company launch on a blog or a changelog
- Newsletter issuea weekly or monthly issue to subscribers
- SEO pillar page (HubSpot)the definitive guide to a topic that links out to narrower posts
Project & program management
- Project charterPMI PMBOK Guide; the document that formally authorizes a project
- RACI matrixResponsibility assignment matrix from project-management practice
- RAID logProgram-management standard (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies)
- Weekly status report (RAG)Program-management standard with Red / Amber / Green health
- Stakeholder mapMendelow's power–interest grid (1991)
- Standard operating procedure (SOP)ISO 9001 quality-management documentation and FDA GMP practice
Personal & casual
- GTD weekly reviewDavid Allen, Getting Things Done (2001)
- Annual review (Past Year Review)Tim Ferriss's "Past Year Review" plus the classic keep/stop/start year-end reflection
- Decision journalRecommended by Daniel Kahneman and Annie Duke (Thinking in Bets, 2018); popularized by Farnam Street
- Personal mission statementStephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), Habit 2: "Begin with the end in mind."
- Five Minute JournalIntelligent Change's Five Minute Journal, based on positive-psychology gratitude research
- Bullet Journal monthly & daily logRyder Carroll, the Bullet Journal method (2013)
- Ideal weekMichael Hyatt's "Ideal Week"; related to time-blocking (Cal Newport)
- Zero-based personal budgetZero-based budgeting, popularized for households by YNAB ("give every dollar a job") and Dave Ramsey
- Trip plan & itineraryTravel-planning practice; day-by-day itinerary plus logistics sheet
- Family meeting agendaBruce Feiler, The Secrets of Happy Families (2013), adapting agile retrospectives for families
- Book notesDerek Sivers's book-notes pages and the commonplace-book tradition (Ryan Holiday)
- Event run-of-showEvent and wedding-planning standard; minute-by-minute schedule with owners
- Recipe card (mise en place format)Professional kitchen practice; ingredients listed in order of use, prep separated from cooking
Email templates
- Cold outreach (Problem–Agitate–Solve)PAS copywriting formula (Dan Kennedy and direct-response tradition); short-form cold email norms
- Double opt-in intro request & forwardable emailVenture-capital and startup networking norm: ask the connector first, and give them a short blurb they can forward unchanged
- Follow-up / gentle nudgeSales and professional-networking practice
- Networking coffee / advice requestInformational-interview practice (Richard Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute?)
- Post-interview thank-youRecruiting norm; sent within 24 hours
- Saying no gracefully (Yes–No–Yes)William Ury, The Power of a Positive No (2007)
- Apology / service recovery emailService-recovery practice (e.g., Ritz-Carlton LEAP / HEARD models) and research on effective apologies
- Meeting request with agendaEffective-meetings practice (Amazon narrative pre-reads; Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting)
- Meeting recap / follow-upProject-management norm; sent within 24 hours
- Escalation emailOperations and program-management practice
- Handoff / delegation emailManagement practice (Grove's task-relevant maturity; military commander's intent)
- Salary / offer negotiation emailNegotiation practice (Fisher & Ury, Getting to Yes; Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference)
- Resignation emailHR and career-management norm; delivered after telling your manager in person
- Complaint to a companyConsumer-advocacy practice; getting a resolution with a paper trail
- Congratulations / thank-you note (personal)Etiquette tradition (Emily Post)
- Condolence noteEtiquette and grief-support guidance