Getting started
The fastest useful setup takes about an afternoon. You need one kind of work, one prompt worth sharing, and about twenty people who do that work.
Start narrow. Teams that map twenty work types on day one almost always stall. Teams that pick the single task their people do most inconsistently almost always keep going.
1. Create a work type
Name the task the way your people would say it: customer follow-ups, not Customer Engagement Standardization. If two people in different departments would both recognize the name as describing their job, it's a good work type.
2. Add the people who do it
Not the team. The people who actually do that task, wherever they sit. This will usually cross reporting lines, and that's the point.
3. Seed it with one prompt
Find the person who does the task best and ask for their version. One good prompt beats twenty adequate ones. The loop needs something worth reusing before it can start.
4. Wait three weeks
Don't announce it heavily and don't chase contributions. The question you're testing is whether people who didn't write the prompt come back to it on their own. That answer tells you whether this will work in your organization.
Work types
A work type is a kind of work, not a team, a department, or a job title. It's the unit Worktype uses to route everything.
The distinction matters because the set of people who share a manager and the set of people who share a task are almost never the same set. Scoping to a team means most recipients don't do the work and most people who do the work never receive it.
- Good work types: customer follow-ups, incident reports, vendor evaluations, weekly status updates
- Poor work types: the marketing team, EMEA, senior managers, anything that names a group of people rather than an activity
People can belong to as many work types as they do kinds of work. Most belong to three or four.
The contribution loop
Worktype never asks people to contribute. Contribution is a byproduct of three things happening in order.
Save. Someone keeps a prompt because they'll want it again. It's private and stays that way. This is the only behavior you ever have to encourage.
Nominate. When people who didn't write a prompt keep coming back to it, it enters the promotion queue automatically. There's no submission step and no committee.
Promote. A curator reviews the queue and promotes. The prompt is now scoped to a work type and reaches everyone who does that work.
Promotion is reversible. A standard that stops working gets demoted, and the record shows when and by whom.
Variables
Variables are how one standard survives local difference without forking. Instead of twelve versions of a prompt for twelve sites, you define the blanks and let local reality fill them.
A curator owns the shape: which variables exist and what can go in them. Some are filled automatically from a person's profile; others are chosen at the point of use.
Curating and promoting
Curation is a role, not a job. In practice it's about twenty minutes a week reviewing what usage has already put forward.
A curator does not write prompts, approve requests, or gatekeep. They confirm that something usage already identified as good should become the standard for that work type.
Evidence measures
Four measures, each pointing at named people and dated events.
- Reuse by non-author: how often something is used by people who didn't write it. The one quality signal that can't be gamed.
- Spread: prompts that escaped the work type they were written for.
- Contribution rate: share of promoted work coming from outside the usual small group.
- Work-type coverage: where a shared standard has landed, and an ordered list of where it hasn't.
Exports for leadership
Every view exports as a dated PNG or CSV. Exports carry the date and the underlying counts so a claim made in a deck can be traced back to specific events.
Single sign-on
Worktype supports Microsoft Entra ID on the Team plan. Work-type membership can be seeded from directory attributes, but is never derived from reporting structure.
Browser extension
The extension lets people save a prompt where they're already working, without switching tabs. It is explicit-save only. It does not read, log, or observe anything on the page unless a person deliberately saves it.
Privacy and data
Three commitments that will not change:
- No ambient capture. Nothing enters Worktype unless a person deliberately saves it.
- Private by default. A saved prompt is visible only to its author until it's promoted.
- No cross-tenant reads. Nothing your organization builds is visible to another, aggregated into benchmarks, or used to train models.