Writing future-proof requirements for notification infrastructure is difficult. The problems you face when first setting up notifications in your product are different from the hurdles that appear once you scale.
As you grow your customer base and expand your team, your notification challenges begin to overlap in complexity. This includes balancing development velocity with brand compliance, and enabling cross-team collaboration without friction.
These are not simple problems to solve. Developers complain about how difficult it is to create visually appealing templates, as they struggle with poor UX in notification tooling, confusing workflow processes, and inconsistent rendering across email clients.
In this article, we'll explain how to choose a template management system with the right low-level primitives and abstractions that can scale alongside your business.
Governance
When multiple teams work on notification templates, tracking changes and maintaining accountability becomes messy.
Knock's roles and permissions model enables you to define exactly who can access parts of your notification system, with roles ranging from owner and admin to member and support.
Team members with edit permissions can use Knock’s git-like version control, where changes must be explicitly saved and committed before they take effect. This prevents accidental updates and provides clear separation between work-in-progress and customer-facing content. You can also add additional environments so that template management in Knock matches your broader development workflow.
In addition to these safeguards, Knock's audit log captures the complete history of template edits and access events, helping you quickly identify what changed and who changed it. This feature is particularly important for companies in regulated industries with data compliance laws.
Editing
When companies first start sending notifications, the engineering team usually controls everything. But as your company grows, different people will need to create and edit templates, and some won't be technical.
This creates a challenge. Technical team members need powerful code editing tools, while non-technical users want flexible visual tools.
Knock solves this by offering template editing tooling for both groups. For developers, Knock provides code editing features like typeahead and autocomplete, which speeds up template creation by suggesting variables, filters, and functions as you type. Knock uses the popular Liquid templating language, which supports conditional logic and filtering capabilities.
For non-technical team members, like product managers and marketers, Knock offers visual editing tools. Team members can format text easily with Knock's toolbar or by styling Markdown. Knock's drag-and-drop components enables them to visually arrange elements without writing code.
Both technical and non-technical users benefit from Knock's preview functionality, which enables them to immediately see how notifications will appear with real user data.
Composability
As your notification use cases grow, the number of templates you manage can quickly expand.
For example, a legal disclaimer at the end of your emails may need to be updated. With just 5 email templates, making this change manually is simple. But once you grow to have dozens or hundreds of templates, you might easily miss updating one and send out incorrect information.
Knock solves this problem with Partials. Partials let you create, manage, and version different pieces of content independently, then combine them to build complete templates.
In Knock, you could create the disclaimer as a partial, then use it when building each template. When you need to update the legal language, you just change the partial once, and all templates using that partial will automatically include the updated version in future notifications.
Programmability
The developer experience of a dashboard is important, but as your notification needs grow your engineering team will want to control resources locally and remotely through a CLI and API.
Knock satisfies this requirement with a Management API that gives you control over your notification templates, and also your workflows. This means developers can create, update, and manage templates on their local machine, or within their CI/CD process.
A uniquely valuable feature of Knock’s API is the ability to preview templates programmatically. This lets you build custom interfaces where your end users can personalize their notification templates while seeing exactly how they'll look.
Localization
Another challenge that emerges as you scale to a global audience is localization. When you first start sending product notifications, you might only serve users who speak your team’s language. But as your product grows, you'll need to translate your notifications to reach a new audience.
Knock's translation features enable you to create and manage notification content in multiple languages. Instead of maintaining language-specific variants for each template, in Knock you can manage a single template for a language and specify translations for any text elements. When you need to introduce a new language, you just add one new translation file, not a new variant for every single template.
Use Knock to manage templates at scale
Knock’s template management was designed to scale with product. We offer flexible editing tools and strong guardrails so your templating can be fast and error-free.
Try Knock for free, and start creating consistent and compliant notifications across all your channels.