You are starting a job in a new company. Your new boss gives you an assignment and lets you know there is a template for that! Nice that will be easy. You open the template, and sure, it has a structure in it, but you have no clue on how to fill it.  For example, you wonder: "How much content should you really put in that field?"

One thing I learned from creating Notion templates that others use is to not only give the template but show an example with actual data in it or at least give prompts that people can answer to fill stuff.

This is the stuff we do well on forms on the web, where we have both a label before the place where you can add text and a placeholder text that shows you how to format it. But that's typically the type of content we forget to put in work templates to make them actually usable (1).

(1) This can obviously be done in different ways. You can have placeholder content like it's done in forms, you can use prompts or guiding messages (as I did in the notion template screenshot shown here) or you can give next to the template a few real-world examples of how the template was used to see the end results.

This is a first draft of a principle that might end up in a book of the "Service Design Principles" series.