Most briefs we receive are specifications for a solution someone has already decided on. 'We need a chatbot.' 'We need a new website.' 'We need to migrate to the cloud.' The solution may well be right — but a brief that starts there removes the one thing a good partner can offer, which is a second opinion on whether the problem has been framed correctly.
State the problem, not the product
Describe what is happening in the business that made you pick up the phone. Customers are leaving before they finish checkout. Quotes take two weeks. The board cannot get a straight answer about cloud spend. That sentence is worth more than a feature list, because it tells the partner what success has to change.
Say what 'done' looks like
Not in features — in outcomes. Quotes out the same day. A storefront that loads in under two seconds on a mid-range phone. A cost report the finance director trusts. If you cannot describe done, that is useful information too: the first job is to find out.
Admit what you have already tried
The failed pilot, the agency that did not work out, the tool that is half-rolled-out. None of this is embarrassing and all of it is useful. It tells a partner where the organisational resistance lives, which is where projects actually fail.
Name the owner
Who, inside your company, will make decisions on this work every week? If the answer is a committee, say so, and expect the timeline to reflect it. If the answer is nobody yet, that is the first thing to fix — before any partner is engaged.
Be explicit about constraints
- Budget range, even if it is wide. A partner who does not know whether you mean thirty thousand or three hundred thousand will propose the wrong thing.
- Hard dates and why they are hard. A regulatory deadline is different from a conference.
- Systems that cannot change, data that cannot leave, vendors that are already chosen.
- Who has to approve what, and how long that usually takes.
Leave room for the uncomfortable answer
The most valuable thing a partner can say in the first meeting is 'we think the problem is somewhere else.' A brief that invites that — rather than asking for a quote against a fixed solution — tends to lead to shorter, cheaper and more successful work.
A good brief is one page. It describes a situation, a desired outcome, what has been tried, who owns it, and what cannot change. Everything else is a conversation.