Use Built-in Panel Templates

Time: ~4 minutes
Learning outcome: Discover and use Council’s built-in templates for specialized deliberation scenarios.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this tutorial, you will:

• List all available built-in templates
• Inspect template details to understand the expert panel composition
• Run a debate using a template

Prerequisites

• Completed Tutorial 1: Install and First Debate
• Familiarity with council convene

What are templates?

Templates are pre-configured expert panels designed for specific decision contexts. Each template includes:

• Curated experts with specific roles and perspectives
• Optimized system prompts tailored to the scenario
• Sensible defaults for debate configuration

Templates are optional — Council can auto-compose a panel for any topic — but they provide consistency and expertise for common use cases.

Step 1: List available templates

See all built-in templates:

council templates

You’ll see output like:

Built-in templates (17):

Engineering:
  • architecture-review
    Multi-perspective review of architecture and engineering decisions
  • code-review
    Multi-perspective code review with separated concerns
  • incident-postmortem
    Blameless analysis of a production incident

Product & Design:
  • product-strategy-review
    Pressure-tests a product strategy or major bet
  • roadmap-prioritization
    Turns a noisy backlog into a defensible ranked roadmap
  • ux-review
    Reviews a user experience — a flow, screen, or redesign

Go-to-Market:
  • brand-positioning-review
    Pressure-tests a brand and positioning decision
  • enterprise-deal-review
    Reviews a high-stakes enterprise deal from five seats
  • growth-experiment-review
    Reviews a growth experiment before launch
  • negotiation-prep
    Prepares for a high-stakes negotiation
  • pricing-packaging-review
    Stress-tests a pricing and packaging decision

Finance, People, Legal & Executive:
  • executive-strategy-board-prep
    Prepares an executive team for a board meeting
  • fpna-budget-review
    Pressure-tests an annual or quarterly budget
  • hiring-decision-review
    Stress-tests a hiring decision before the offer
  • legal-risk-review
    Reviews a contract, launch, or risk decision

Startup & Career:
  • career-coaching
    Career-decision panel for engineers
  • startup-validation
    Stress-test a startup or product idea

Use with: council convene "<topic>" --panel <name>

Step 2: Inspect a template

Before using a template, inspect it to see the full expert panel composition:

council templates inspect architecture-review

You’ll see:

• Template name and description
• List of experts with roles and responsibilities
• Default configuration (max rounds, debate mode, etc.)

Example output:

Template: architecture-review
Description: Technical architecture decisions with cross-functional perspectives

Experts (4):
  • Alex Chen (CTO)
    Strategic technical vision, long-term system design, risk assessment

  • Jordan Martinez (Staff Engineer)
    Implementation feasibility, technical debt, engineering velocity

  • Sam Okafor (Site Reliability Engineer)
    Operational impact, scalability, observability, incident response

  • Taylor Kim (Product Manager)
    User impact, business value, time-to-market, stakeholder alignment

Debate mode: panel
Max rounds: 4

Step 3: Run a template-based debate

Use a template by passing the --template flag (or its shorter alias --panel):

council convene "Should we migrate from REST to GraphQL?" --template architecture-review

Or using the shorter --panel alias:

council convene "Should we migrate from REST to GraphQL?" --panel architecture-review

What happens:

1. Council loads the architecture-review template
2. The CTO, Staff Engineer, SRE, and PM experts are instantiated with their specialized prompts
3. The debate proceeds with perspectives tailored to architectural decisions

You’ll see output like:

✓ Panel assembled: 4 experts (architecture-review template)
  • Alex Chen (CTO) — claude-sonnet-4.5
  • Jordan Martinez (Staff Engineer) — claude-sonnet-4.5
  • Sam Okafor (Site Reliability Engineer) — claude-sonnet-4.5
  • Taylor Kim (Product Manager) — claude-sonnet-4.5

━━━ Round 1 ━━━

[Alex Chen — CTO]
GraphQL gives clients query flexibility, but we need to be
honest about the operational cost...

[Sam Okafor — SRE]
Alex is underselling the observability nightmare. With REST,
every endpoint is a discrete trace. With GraphQL...

When to use templates vs. auto-composition

Use auto-composition when…	Use templates when…
Exploring a new topic or question	You need consistent panel composition
You want Council to design the panel	The scenario is a known domain (e.g., code review)
The topic doesn’t fit a template	You’re running repeated debates on similar topics

What you accomplished

• Listed all built-in templates
• Inspected a template’s expert panel configuration
• Ran a debate using a specialized template

Next steps

• Tutorial 4: Resume a Debate — Continue a prior debate or view its transcript
• Try other templates: Experiment with startup-validation, code-review, or career-coaching
• Customize templates: Once comfortable, explore creating custom panel definitions

Commands introduced

Command	Purpose
council templates	List all built-in panel templates
council templates inspect	Show detailed template configuration
council convene --template	Run debate with specified template
council convene --panel	Shorter alias for --template

Built-in template reference

All 17 built-in panels organized by discipline:

Engineering

Template	Use for…
architecture-review	Multi-perspective review of architecture and engineering decisions
code-review	Multi-perspective code review with separated concerns
incident-postmortem	Blameless analysis of a production incident

Product & Design

Template	Use for…
product-strategy-review	Pressure-tests a product strategy or major bet
roadmap-prioritization	Turns a noisy backlog into a defensible ranked roadmap
ux-review	Reviews a user experience — a flow, screen, or redesign

Go-to-Market

Template	Use for…
brand-positioning-review	Pressure-tests a brand and positioning decision
enterprise-deal-review	Reviews a high-stakes enterprise deal from five seats
growth-experiment-review	Reviews a growth experiment before launch or before shipping the “winner”
negotiation-prep	Prepares for a high-stakes negotiation from five seats
pricing-packaging-review	Stress-tests a pricing and packaging decision

Finance, People, Legal & Executive

Template	Use for…
executive-strategy-board-prep	Prepares an executive team for a board meeting or major strategy decision
fpna-budget-review	Pressure-tests an annual or quarterly budget (decision-support, not financial advice)
hiring-decision-review	Stress-tests a hiring decision before the offer (decision-support, not professional HR advice)
legal-risk-review	Reviews a contract, launch, or risk decision (decision-support, not legal advice)

Startup & Career

Template	Use for…
career-coaching	Career-decision panel for engineers weighing IC vs. management or job changes
startup-validation	Stress-test a startup or product idea