Templates

What a template carries

Starting a campaign from a blank canvas means deciding everything yourself: which stages the work moves through, what kinds of cards exist, when something counts as done. A template makes those decisions once and carries them into every board you create from it:

• The phases: the stages of the campaign, laid out as regions on the canvas.
• The card types: which kinds of cards exist on this board, from research notes to full deliverables.
• The statuses: which statuses are enabled and the colors they show in.
• The connection types: which kinds of links between cards are allowed, so lineage stays meaningful.
• Seed cards: starter cards that come with real content instead of empty placeholders.
• Board guidance: text that tells your agent how to behave on this board (what the process is, what belongs where, what good looks like).

None of it is locked in. A board created from a template is a normal board: add phases, rename things, delete seed cards you don't need. The template decides where you start, not where you end up.

The Ecommerce Campaign playbook

The official template is Ecommerce Campaign, and it is a complete campaign process: six phases running Research → Audience → Strategy → Create → Launch → Measure. It arrives with seed cards that do real work: a campaign brief that prompts you for objective, offer, audience, and channels; a primary-audience card; and a campaign plan. Email and creative deliverables come pre-mounted. When your agent starts drafting, an email is a structured email card with a subject, a preheader, and a real rendered body rather than a wall of text, and an ad is a creative card with copy and media slots.

The Quickstart uses this template for a reason: fill in the brief, brief your agent, and the campaign has somewhere sensible to go from the first minute.

Creating a board from a template

In the app, click New board and open the template browser. Each template shows a pannable preview of its real structure, the actual phase columns and cards rather than a marketing thumbnail, so you see exactly what you're committing to. A checkbox on the same screen lets you opt the new board out of your workspace guidelines if this board shouldn't follow them.

Your agent can do this too: it can list the templates available in your workspace (the official playbook and any private ones of your own) and create a board from one. Either way, every board remembers which template, and which version of it, it was created from.

List the templates available in Plainpaper and create a board from the Ecommerce Campaign playbook called "Black Friday 2026: P&P Bookstore".

Then read the new board and tell me which seed cards it came with, so I know where to start.

Your own templates

Any board you've already built can become a template. Save it as a private workspace template and your recurring campaign (the product launch you run every quarter, the promo cycle you've refined over a year) becomes your own playbook, with its category colors and icons preserved. Private templates live only in your workspace; nobody else sees them.

Templates steer the agent

The part of a template you never see on the canvas may matter most: its guidance text reaches your agent automatically at the start of every session on that board. Even in a fresh chat, days later, on a different device, the agent opens the board already knowing the campaign process, without you re-explaining it. Together with brand guidelines (how your brand speaks, workspace-wide) and card comments (what to change, card by card), template guidance is the third layer of steering: how this kind of campaign is run.

Related

• Set up your first campaign: a full campaign on the Ecommerce Campaign template.
• Boards & the canvas: what phases, statuses, and connections are.
• Deliverables: the structured email and creative cards templates pre-mount.