Hi @mfriedman, thanks for your post! 

After converting one of your documents into a custom template, you will indeed need to share this template with team members (just like you would any other document) before they can use it to create new documents. 

For more information as well as the necessary steps, please take a look at the sharing section of the Templates Help Center article. Hope this helps!

@Eric R thank you for your reply! This makes sense to me. I was hopeful there was a way around the more manual sharing, in a way to set up an internal / account specific template log where we can choose from what our peers elect to make “public”

@mfriedman what you are describing sounds similar to out Corporate Template feature, which allows Team and Template Admins to manage all Corporate Templates on the account. Please read through the linked Help Center article for more information on this. Note that this feature is only available on Enterprise-level accounts.