What prompt structure gives consistent results for business tasks?
My prompts work once and then give a very different response the next time. Is there a simple structure I can reuse for emails, plans, summaries, and other business work?
A reliable structure is: role, goal, context, constraints, output format, and one example. For instance, say who the assistant should act as, what decision the output must support, the facts it may use, what it must avoid, and the exact headings or table columns you want. Also tell it what to do when information is missing—ask a question or mark it as unknown instead of guessing. That last instruction improves consistency more than adding lots of adjectives.
Keep the stable instructions separate from the changing input. I save the role, rules, and output format as a template, then replace only the customer details or source text. If you edit the whole prompt every time, it becomes difficult to know which change caused a better or worse result.