How to Brief a Template Project (So You Get What You Actually Need)

A template project that goes well starts with a good brief. A template project that goes sideways starts with "we need a PowerPoint template" and nothing else.

This happens more often than you'd think. A business knows it needs professional templates for its Microsoft Office documents and presentations, but the brief is either so vague that the template agency has to guess at everything, or so focused on surface-level aesthetics ("can you match our brand colours") that the deeper questions never get asked.

The deeper questions are the ones that determine whether your finished template actually works for your team, scales across your business, and survives contact with the 150 people who'll be using it. They're also the questions that a good template design agency should be asking you. If nobody's asking them, that's a red flag.

Whether you're commissioning a PowerPoint template, a Word report template, a proposal template, or a full suite of Microsoft Office templates, here's what a strong brief looks like and the decisions worth making before you start.

Start with the Problem

The most useful thing you can tell a template agency is why you need new templates. What's not working with what you have now? Where are the pain points?

Maybe your team spends hours reformatting documents because the current templates are inconsistent. Maybe your presentations look different every time because people can't find layouts that work for their content. Maybe you've rebranded and need everything updated. Maybe you're rolling out AI tools like Copilot and your templates aren't structured for it. Maybe you've never had professional templates and everyone's been starting from scratch.

Each of these problems points to a different solution. A rebrand project is primarily a design exercise. A "templates keep breaking" problem is a structural and architectural exercise. An AI-readiness project is a technical exercise. A good brief describes the problem clearly enough that your agency can design the right solution, one that goes beyond a pretty file.

Who's Using These Templates?

This question shapes everything. A template built for a marketing team of ten who are comfortable with PowerPoint is a very different build from a template built for a 500-person business where most users have basic Office skills and no design training.

Think about the range of users. Are they confident with Office or do they need the template to be as simple as possible? Will they be working on Mac, PC, or both? (This affects which automation technologies are available.) Are they creating documents from scratch or populating pre-built structures? Are multiple people collaborating in the same file?

Tell your agency how many people will use the templates, what their skill levels look like, and what platforms they're working on. This influences decisions about complexity, automation, and how much flexibility to build into the layouts versus how much to control.

What Documents and Presentations Do You Actually Produce?

A template project should start with an audit of what your team actually creates, in practice. Gather examples of the real documents and presentations your team has produced in the last six months. The good ones, the messy ones, the ones that took way too long, the ones you were embarrassed to send.

These examples tell a template agency far more than a brand guidelines PDF. They show the actual content your team needs to present: the chart-heavy quarterly report, the text-light pitch deck, the data-dense capability statement, the one-page executive summary. They show where layouts are missing, where formatting falls apart, and where people are spending time doing things manually that should be automated.

When you share these with your agency, be honest about what works and what doesn't. Marking up examples with "this slide always takes ages to format" or "we never use this layout" is gold. It helps the agency design a template that matches your reality.

Brand Guidelines: What to Share and What to Discuss

Your agency will need your brand guidelines, obviously. Logos, colour palette, fonts, any rules about spacing, imagery, or tone of voice. Share the complete set.

But also be prepared for a conversation about how those guidelines translate to Office. Print brand guidelines and digital brand guidelines don't always map neatly to PowerPoint or Word. Your brand font might not be licensed for embedding in documents. Your colour palette might have twelve colours but PowerPoint's theme colour system has slots for ten. Your brand guidelines might specify a minimum logo size that doesn't work on a PowerPoint slide at 16:9 ratio.

A good template agency will flag these issues early and propose solutions. If you know about any of these tensions already, mention them in the brief. It saves time.

Also worth noting: if your business is using (or planning to use) Microsoft 365 Copilot with Brand Kit, share that information too. AI-ready template builds have specific structural requirements around placeholders, sample slide types, and theme definitions that influence the design and build process. An agency that knows about this upfront can build for it from the start rather than retrofitting later.

What Level of Automation Do You Need?

Templates exist on a spectrum from simple (a well-designed file with proper layouts and styles) to complex (a document system with VBA macros, content controls, automated formatting, data population from external sources, and custom ribbon tools).

Where you land on that spectrum depends on your workflows. If your team produces the same quarterly report every three months and spends two days reformatting it, automation could cut that to two hours. If your team builds ad hoc presentations for different clients, you probably need layout flexibility more than automation.

You don't need to know the technical answer (that's your agency's job). You need to describe the workflow honestly. How often do you produce this document? What takes the longest? What's repetitive? What are the manual steps that frustrate people? A good agency will map those answers to the right technical solution, whether that's content controls, VBA, VSTO add-ins, Office.js for cross-platform compatibility, or simply a better set of master layouts.

What Does Success Look Like?

This is the question most briefs skip entirely, and it's one of the most important. What does a successful template project look like for your business?

Is it "everyone's presentations look consistent"? Is it "report production takes half the time"? Is it "new staff can create a branded document on their first day without training"? Is it "our templates work with Copilot and Brand Kit"? Each of these implies a different emphasis in the build.

Being explicit about what success looks like gives your agency a target to design towards and a benchmark to measure against. It also helps avoid the most common post-project disappointment: the template looks great but doesn't solve the operational problem it was supposed to address.

Questions Your Template Agency Should Be Asking You

A brief is a two-way conversation. Your agency should be asking questions that go beyond the visual. What does your approval process look like for documents? How are templates currently distributed? Do you need version control or template update management? Are there accessibility requirements (WCAG compliance, for instance)? Do you have templates in other formats (InDesign, Canva) that need to be translated into Office?

If an agency takes your brief, asks no follow-up questions, and comes back two weeks later with a pretty file, they've designed a template based on assumptions. And assumptions in template builds are where things go wrong.

At Ideaseed, our discovery process typically involves a detailed scoping call, a review of existing documents and templates, a discussion about workflows and pain points, and questions about technical requirements (platforms, automation, AI tools, accessibility). By the time we start designing, we understand how the template will be used in practice, which matters far more than what it should look like on paper.

A Brief Worth Writing

Putting together a proper brief takes a bit of time, but it pays off in a template that works from day one. Gather your brand guidelines, collect recent examples of real documents your team has produced, write down the pain points and frustrations, identify who'll be using the templates and on what platforms, think about what success looks like, and flag any upcoming changes (rebrands, AI rollouts, new document types) that might affect the build.

That's a brief worth working from. And if the agency you're talking to doesn't ask for this level of detail, consider whether they understand how complex a good template build actually is.

Claire is a design and template specialist at Ideaseed with experience spanning presentation design, document design, accessibility, and Microsoft Office templates and automation. Claire focuses on creating templates that are both visually polished and technically sound.

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