<aside> 👉 You can get my SOP system Notion template for free through GumRoad. If you’d like to understand what the goals were as I created the system, please read on!
</aside>
While there is no lack of SOP document templates out there, I haven’t managed to find a reliable system for organising and maintaining SOPs. Since I believe you should only have a single knowledge management tool in your stack, I built out my system on Notion, which is what I use for pretty much everything.
SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure - it’s really just detailed documentation with step by step instructions on how to run specific processes at your company. Processes can cover anything from how to onboard new customers, to launching new features and expensing business trips.
As a startup grows, it accumulates more and more processes. With a small team, this isn’t so much of a problem, but as you start scaling and onboarding new people, they all need to be trained on how to carry out specific processes - the quicker you can do this, the faster you can grow.
High quality SOPs can return the time you spend writing them 100x. They let you onboard new team members faster, ensure best practice, and share the kind of knowledge that only that one person seems to have.
Well, ideally all processes should be documented and the earlier the better, but realistically in a startup you’re balancing a million priorities so you don’t always make the time for documentation. If your startup is experiencing slow employee onboarding and seeing a few people being constantly asked how to do things, it’s probably time to take documentation more seriously - the payoff will be instant.
A good goal for an SOP is for someone new to the company to be able to pull it up and successfully carry out the process end to end without any other assistance. In order to do so, it needs to be detailed but concise and kept up to date.
Notion has a great template for individual SOP documents. In general, a specific SOP should include the below sections.
What is the purpose of the SOP? What does it enable you to do? The reader should be able to quickly go through this section and understand if it’s going to let them do what they’re after.
Describe the context under which this procedure should take place. Add links to other docs that are relevant in carrying this out successfully.
This is the crux of the doc. It should provide fool-proof step by step instructions on how to carry out the process successfully. Feel free to use Loom or Miro to embed visual aids that make the process simple to follow.