You’ve bought a new vacuum cleaner—it’s pretty, it’s awesome, it has the most advanced features, and you can’t wait to use it.
Not so fast!
Right after you take it out of the box, you can’t figure out how to turn it on. You reach for the technical documentation that comes with the product but can’t decipher it at all. Your excitement turns into desperation (and even regret) as you try to make that thing work. 🫣
Whether you’re manufacturing home appliances or developing software, you never want users to feel lost and confused about your product’s functionality.
Writing clear and concise technical software documentation is absolutely vital to support customers and reduce service tickets. Plus, it’s also useful internally, especially for training new employees, maintaining product or service quality, troubleshooting issues, and building knowledge bases.
In this article, we’ll discuss the best technical documentation templates to describe your products in detail and keep your teams and end users happy and informed.
- What Is a Technical Documentation Template?
- 10 Free Technical Documentation Templates
- 1. ClickUp Product Brief Document Template
- 2. ClickUp Product Positioning Template
- 3. ClickUp Product Pricing Template
- 4. ClickUp Company Processes Document Template
- 5. ClickUp Process and Procedures Template
- 6. ClickUp Process Mapping Template
- 7. ClickUp Source Documentation SOP Template
- 8. Knowledge Base Article Template by Hubspot
- 9. Employee Handbook Template by Almanac.io
- 10. Technical Documentation Template by Template.net
- Technical Documentation Templates: Docs or It Didn’t Happen!
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is a Technical Documentation Template?
Technical documentation is most commonly associated with manuals that help users understand how to use a product and offer details on its features. But that’s only one of its purposes.
Technical documentation is an essential internal tool, as it serves many teams, from software development and marketing to sales, quality assurance, and customer service. For the document to be effective, it needs to be detailed but concise, and hitting this sweet spot can be challenging, which is why you should consider using a template.
A great technical documentation template provides the framework for outlining your product’s features and uses. It helps you stay on the right course and focus on relevant, digestible information without overwhelming the reader.
A quality technical documentation template serves as your product’s biography. You can expect defined sections to present product details and features. The written trace can preserve product knowledge for future employees AND potentially provide legal and liability protection.
What are the different kinds of technical documentation?
Regardless of your audience and line of industry, some of the most common kinds of technical documentation examples:
- User guides (manuals): Intended for end users and aim to clearly and methodically describe product features, parts, and uses
- Repair manuals: Walk users through the process of fixing issues that may arise
- API documentation: Describes an application programming interface (API) in detail, mainly for spec-driven professionals. It contains instructions for using and integrating with an API
- Release notes: Provide detailed descriptions of software product features and typically contain bug fixes or updates
- Knowledge base documentation: Online library that contains how-to guides, answers to FAQs, troubleshooting instructions, and other product-related information to help end users find the data they need
- Procedure manuals: The outline of the necessary steps that help employees complete a process or task
Summarize this article for me please10 Free Technical Documentation Templates
We’ve combed through dozens of templates to create technical documentation and selected the top 10 to help you put details about your product into words without losing focus. Check them out and find the best solution for you, whether for creating technical documentation for internal use or helping end users get to know your product. 💪
1. ClickUp Product Brief Document Template
If you want to ensure smooth sailing through the product development process, you need to provide your team with the weapons to tame the waves. 🌊
The ClickUp Product Brief Document Template helps you define goals, outline your product’s features, and ensure consistency across the board. It’s a pre-built ClickUp Doc with sections dedicated to every aspect of your product.
What’s a ClickUp Doc?
It is the platform’s unique feature that allows you to create, manage, collaborate, and edit documents with your coworkers and guests, so you centralize information—technical documents or not! You and other users (including your technical collaborators) can edit the Docs in real time, leave comments, attach them to tasks, and organize your review process in a jiff.
This particular process documentation template comes with four sections:
- 2-Pager: Shows how your product solves customer problems and outlines your goals
- Release Plan: Breaks the product launch into milestones to tailor the perfect product release plan
- Functional Specs: Defines the user persona and how your product helps them overcome problems. It also describes product features in detail
- Appendices: Includes additional info and useful resources that boost collaboration
The template can also serve as a product requirements document thanks to its customizability.
2. ClickUp Product Positioning Template
Knowing your product’s ins and outs is vital for determining what sets it apart from the competition and how to position it on the market. The ClickUp Product Positioning Template helps you pinpoint your product’s strong points, identify target customers, and develop the best positioning strategy. ✨
Start using the template by filling out the form in the Product Positioning Assessment view. Collect info about your product’s unique selling points and the challenges it helps overcome. The form is editable, so you can adjust it to align with your company’s goals and line of work.
If you need help creating the form, use ClickUp AI—the platform’s first-class writing assistant. This will help you get all your technical documents specific to your needs.
The info from the form is automatically transferred to the Product List view. This view gives you a centralized hub for managing all your products by creating separate tasks for each of them.
Tasks are grouped by their status—planning, in progress, in review, etc.—but you can change this criterion by pressing “group by” in the top-right corner of the screen.
The Product Positioning Map view is a ClickUp Whiteboard—a digital canvas suitable for collaboration and brainstorming. This view is where you’ll visualize the position of your product compared to the competition.
With a little customization, this template can serve as the foundation for outlining project requirements before the product launch.
3. ClickUp Product Pricing Template
Pricing your product isn’t a guessing game—you can’t just pick a price based on how much money you want to earn (although that sounds awesome). You need to take a good look at your competition and be aware of your product’s tangible value, and the ClickUp Product Pricing Template can help with that.
With this template, you’ll be able to develop accurate pricing strategies, adjust prices, and manage inventory across your technical documents and through these two views:
- Products by Category view: Displays all your products along with their details, such as brand, SKU (stock-keeping unit), technical documentation types, and size. Edit these Custom Fields based on your product’s nature
- Products by Brand view: Groups your products by brand and displays their prices. To edit this view, switch the columns’ order and update Custom Fields to ensure the desired info is readily available
Whenever you change a product’s info in one view, the other gets automatically updated, so you don’t have to worry about irregularities across technical documents.
4. ClickUp Company Processes Document Template
Your team needs to work as one to achieve great results, and this is impossible if your company processes aren’t well organized and transparent. The ClickUp Company Processes Document Template stores process documentation in one place and offers consistency and space for spotting and fixing inefficiencies.
This is a document template, which means it doesn’t have multiple views but premade sections. Your only job is to add relevant info regarding a specific company process—from its purpose to the necessary tools and procedures—and create clear guidelines for your team.
Let’s say you want to show your staff how to request time off. The process is as simple as this:
- You’ll add details on request approvals, lines of accountability, and platforms for submitting requests (if necessary, include the password to the selected platform)
- You’ll then demonstrate the step-by-step procedure for submitting the request
- Your team members can follow those steps to request time off and avoid miscommunication and mistakes
Attach related docs, images, or drawings in the last section and centralize your knowledge base. Once you complete the process documentation template, add relevant team members to it and allow them to explore the treasury of information.
5. ClickUp Process and Procedures Template
Well-established company processes and procedures are like your team’s joker card—they boost efficiency, lower the risk of misunderstandings, and do wonders for collaboration and team communication. 🃏
The ClickUp Process and Procedures Template lets you create step-by-step instructions for repetitive tasks and centralize relevant information. Having everything laid out can help you pinpoint bottlenecks and update your processes.
This is another Whiteboard template on our list—the Process Flowchart view lets you drag and drop shapes to visualize every stage of your processes. Leave sticky notes with additional info and keep everyone on the same page.
If you aren’t the visual type, you’ll like the Documentation List view, which lets you outline all processes and procedures. It groups them by department by default, but you can always change this to fit your needs. This view offers a fantastic feature—the Completion Rate Custom Field, which shows you the percentage of work done on the documents. ✔️
Another view available is the Document Stage board, which turns your tasks into cards and groups them by their stage. You can easily switch cards from one stage to another by dragging and dropping.
The last view is the Timeline—use it to understand the duration of processes and procedures by day, week, or month.
6. ClickUp Process Mapping Template
With the ClickUp Process Mapping Template, you’ll have no trouble understanding the processes, defining the steps, and identifying areas of improvement.
This template is a to-do list you can attach to other templates and tasks, which is why ClickUp calls it a task template. The list consists of 22 subtasks that walk you through visualizing and defining a process for your team.
The first step (subtask) is selecting the process you want to map, and the last one is deploying it. In between, you’ll find steps like identifying team members, establishing a timeline, and identifying issues with the current process. Once you complete a subtask, cross it off your list to keep it organized.
You can add to-do lists, attach files, and leave notes within every subtask.
ClickUp also lets you create task dependencies in only a few clicks—simply determine which subtasks should be completed first to optimize workflows. There’s also the option to track the time spent on each subtask, which comes in handy for project managers.
7. ClickUp Source Documentation SOP Template
Want to organize digital piles of source documentation? The ClickUp Source Documentation SOP Template helps you standardize the process of documenting sources.
This template’s premade sections help you outline the steps for collecting and managing source documentation, ensuring all team members follow a standardized approach. This improves efficiency and leaves no room for errors or misunderstandings.
The template is incredibly easy to use, as you only need to add relevant information by following the provided instructions. You start with the general stuff—the purpose and scope of the standard operating procedure.
The Procedure section is what you and your team are most interested in. This section is where you’ll outline the steps for standardizing source documentation processes. You can also attach images to give your team members a visual example of what to do.
The Related Resources section lets you attach relevant docs and links that support the standardization process and help your staff implement it effortlessly.
8. Knowledge Base Article Template by Hubspot
The knowledge base articles lift the burden off your customer support team and help your users solve issues in no time. Considering their importance, putting together quality knowledge base articles can be challenging. Luckily, this doesn’t have to be the case, thanks to the Knowledge Base Article Template by Hubspot.
This Google Doc template helps product managers and technical writers create top-notch knowledge base articles with relevant and concise information.
The template is a pleasure to work in—the necessary sections are already there, along with the instructions on what to include in each of them.
For example, the Common Causes/Issues section guides you to consider why someone would want to read the article. This approach helps you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, write from their perspective, and cater to their needs better.
The template includes everything from outlining issues to providing solutions and tactical rundowns. You even have space to include video walkthroughs and related articles and get customer opinions on whether the exercise was helpful.
The template is customizable, so you can edit or delete existing sections and add new ones to align them with the nature of a product or your company’s policies.
9. Employee Handbook Template by Almanac.io
Employee handbooks may not be considered technical documentation in the traditional sense, but they provide crucial guidelines for your staff and are vital for maintaining clear communication and avoiding misunderstandings.
The Employee Handbook Template by Almanac.io helps you create a detailed handbook that clarifies uncertainties and ensures your staff understands your company’s policies, strategies, and purpose.
This online template offers sections tackling everything your employees need to know. Besides the general info like company values, structure, and organizational charts, the template also digs into specifics like dress codes and the use of company cars.
Every section comes with instructions on how to frame it. If some sections don’t make sense for your company, you can delete them and add new ones to best fit your own technical documentation process.
This template supports online collaboration, so you can invite relevant team members to work together on creating the perfect employee handbook. 🤝
10. Technical Documentation Template by Template.net
Writing technical documentation requires attention to detail—miss one seemingly minor thing, and your entire document could lose purpose. The process is much easier when you have a comprehensive example to guide you, and that’s what the Technical Documentation Template by Template.net is all about!
The template isn’t exactly a template per se—it’s an example of what technical documentation should look like. It covers everything, from general information like the purpose and scope to details like system documentation and sustainability.
It may not boast advanced collaboration features, but it sets the stage for creating technical documentation and project documentation your team will rely on with confidence.
Summarize this article for me pleaseTechnical Documentation Templates: Docs or It Didn’t Happen!
Finding the perfect balance between detailed and easy-to-read technical documentation can be challenging. The listed templates help you with that—they ensure your content is relevant and to the point while giving you more than enough space to outline your product’s strengths.
Like our templates and these technical documentation examples? There’s more!
Explore 1,000+ templates in ClickUp’s library and find ones that suit your company preferences and team dynamics perfectly. 💗
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
