READ TIME - 6 minutes⏳
Templates are often treated as a visual shortcut. A way to save time, enforce consistency, or make reports look cleaner. In reality, a template does far more than standardise colours and layouts. It encodes assumptions about how work is organised, how decisions flow, and how much complexity an organisation is expected to handle.
That’s why templates so often become painful over time. Not because they are visually wrong, but because they were never designed to support the organisational structure they eventually had to serve.
The real problem with most templates
Most templates are created in isolation. A layout is chosen, a colour palette is defined, a few visuals are standardised. Everything feels reasonable at first.
And only later do teams realise something feels off:
- branding becomes inconsistent
- visuals don’t scale across reports
- local cultures turns into a nightmare
- logic creeps into DAX that never should have been there
At that point, the template is no longer helping. It’s constraining.
That usually happens because the template wasn’t designed to support the actual complexity of the organisation.
The issue is rarely execution. It’s alignment.
Also, templates (and design systems) become much harder to manage as soon as more than one person works on them. Changes don’t just affect only visuals anymore: they need to be communicated, versioned, and understood by other developers. Without that, templates quickly create friction instead of consistency.
A useful lens: organisational structure
One useful way to reason about template design comes from organisational theory itself and classic organisational structures: functional, divisional, geographic, and matrix. These map surprisingly well to the demands we place on templates.
Thinking about templates through this lens helps shift the conversation from what should this look like to what does this need to support.
Functional structure: one organisation, many departments
In a functional structure, a single organisation is organised around departments such as HR, Marketing, Finance, or Supply Chain. In this context, templates can remain relatively simple. A single visual identity, a shared set of design rules, and consistent interaction patterns often work well.
Here, the template’s primary role is to maximise reuse and minimise friction. Consistency matters more than flexibility, and that trade-off is usually acceptable. When organisations operate largely in this mode, overengineering templates often creates more problems than it solves.
If your organisation mostly operates this way, your template should optimise for consistency and ease of reuse, not flexibility.
Divisional structure: when brands enter the picture
Once brands are introduced, complexity increases quickly. Multi-brand organisations force an early design decision, especially in Power BI, where a single theme file must often serve multiple use cases.
That forces a decision early:
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do all brands share a common visual language?
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or do brands need distinct identities within the same report?
Teams need to decide whether brands are aligned enough to share a visual language or whether distinct identities must coexist within the same analytical surface.
If brands align, the template can encode shared conventions such as colour logic for sentiment, CTA patterns, and layout rules.
If they don’t, branding logic becomes conditional and data-driven, pushing complexity into DAX and model logic.
Either way, this is no longer “just a theme”. It’s a design system.
Geographic structure: when context matters
Geographic structures add another dimension altogether. Language, currency, date formats, and cultural expectations start to matter in ways that visuals alone can’t solve.
Without planning, localisation logic ends up scattered across visuals and measures, making reports fragile and difficult to maintain. When geography matters, templates must support context awareness from the start. This includes everything from dynamic currency formatting to translated titles and labels.
What feels like a small detail early on becomes a structural concern later.
Templates at this stage must support context awareness, not just appearance.
Matrix structure: where most templates break
Finally, the hardest case.
- Multi-brand.
- Multi-language.
- Multi-currency.
- Multi-function.
This is the matrix structure where most templates quietly break. At this level, a template can no longer be treated as a "file".
It has to function as a system: clear naming conventions, reusable measures, parameter-driven behaviour, and a strict separation between data, logic, and presentation. Attempting to retrofit this kind of structure later almost always results in complexity exploding in the wrong places.
The problem isn’t scale itself. It’s designing templates that aren’t honest about the scale they need to support.
The transformation most teams miss
The shift isn’t about making templates more complex. It’s about making them structurally honest.
When a template reflects how the organisation actually operates, reuse becomes natural, maintenance drops, and decisions become easier. When it doesn’t, every new requirement feels like an exception that needs to be worked around.
Before designing or refactoring a template, pause and look at how your organisation actually works today - not the version you hope to have one day - but the one your users deal with every day.
Which parts of that structure are stable? Which ones already vary? And which complexity is unavoidable right now, instead of something you can realistically deal with later?
Templates don’t just standardise interface. They shape behaviour. And when they are structurally honest, they stop fighting the organisation and start enabling its growth.
What this means in practice
Before designing or refactoring a template, ask:
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what structure are we actually operating in today?
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which dimensions are stable, and which ones vary?
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what complexity do we need to support now (and next year)?
Your template should support that reality, not an idealised version of it.
A question for you
Which organisational reality best describes your current setup: functional, multi-brand, geographic, or matrix? And which aspect of your templates feels hardest to manage right now (branding, localisation, reuse, complexity, ...)?
If this framework helped you think differently about templates, feel free to email me by using the button below. I read every message, and they directly influence what I write about next.
See you next week!
Julien
