7 Best Practices for AI Prompt Engineering to Boost Team Productivity

Working Smarter with AI

Prompt engineering isn’t magic; it’s a process. By following a few simple rules, your team can drastically reduce the “trial and error” phase and get usable results instantly.

Here are our top 7 best practices for 2025, curated from industry standards like the Microsoft Prompt Engineering Guide and our own data.

1. Be Specific (Context is King)

Bad: “Write a sales email.”

Good: “Write a cold email to a CTO at a Series B fintech company. The goal is to book a demo for our cybersecurity software. Keep it under 150 words.”

The more context you provide about the audience, goal, and constraints, the better.

2. Use Delimiters

Help the AI understand the structure of your prompt. Use triple quotes, XML tags, or clear headers to separate instructions from data. This is a recommended tactic by Anthropic’s documentation to prevent instruction injection.

Summarize the text delimited by triple quotes:
"""
[Insert long text here]
"""

3. Ask for Structured Output

Don’t let the AI decide the format. If you need a list, ask for a list. If you need JSON, ask for JSON.

Pro Tip: In Promptlyb, create a template that pre-defines the output structure:

Output format:
- **Headline**: [Bold Header]
- **Body**: [2 paragraphs]
- **CTA**: [Link]

4. Iterate with Regression Testing

The first result is rarely perfect. But how do you know if your edit made it better?

Advanced teams use Regression Testing. Run your old prompt and your new prompt against the same set of 10 test inputs. Compare the results side-by-side.

5. Assign a Persona

Tell the AI who it is.

• “Act as a senior Python developer.”
• “Act as an empathetic customer support agent.”
• “Act as a strict editor.”

This primes the model to access the relevant vocabulary and tone.

6. Test with Edge Cases

Before sharing a prompt with your team, test it with difficult inputs.

• What if the input text is empty?
• What if the user asks a controversial question?
• Does the prompt handle different languages?

7. Stop Using Google Docs (Seriously)

The biggest productivity killer is Prompt Sprawl. If your best prompts are buried in Slack threads or personal notes, your team can’t use them.

The Fix: Centralize everything. Move your winning prompts into a shared library like Promptlyb. Tag them, version them, and make them searchable.

Summary

Great prompting is about clarity, structure, and organization. Apply these 7 rules, and watch your team’s AI output quality skyrocket.

References

1. Microsoft. Prompt engineering techniques. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/concepts/prompt-engineering
2. Anthropic. Introduction to Prompt Design. https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/introduction-to-prompt-design
3. OpenAI. Best practices for prompt engineering with OpenAI API. https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6654000-best-practices-for-prompt-engineering-with-openai-api