How to write a brief that gets you what you want
January 2025 · 4 min read
The single biggest predictor of whether a project goes well is not the studio you hire or the budget you have. It is how clearly you can articulate what you need before work begins. A good brief saves time, reduces misunderstandings, and almost always results in a better end product. Here is what one actually contains.
Why most briefs fail
Most briefs fail because they describe what the client wants to see rather than what the project needs to accomplish. 'We want a modern website with clean design and good UX' tells a developer nothing useful. Every client wants that. What the brief needs to communicate is what success looks like for your specific business: more inquiries, lower support volume, faster onboarding, higher conversion on a specific page.
The other common failure is incompleteness. A brief that covers vision but skips constraints — budget, timeline, technical requirements, existing systems that need to be integrated — sets up a scope conversation that should have happened before the project started.
What to include
A useful brief covers: what the project is and what it should accomplish, who it is for (your actual customers, not a generic description), what you already have that is relevant (existing brand assets, existing tech stack, content that will be reused), what constraints you are working within (budget range, launch deadline, technical requirements), and what the one metric is that will tell you the project was a success.
Examples of work you admire are also useful, especially if you can say what specifically you like about them. 'We like how [site] explains their pricing' is more useful than a list of sites with no context.
What to leave out
Leave out solutions. A brief that says 'we need a chatbot on the homepage' has already decided the answer before hearing the question. Brief the problem: 'visitors are not finding the information they need and are leaving without contacting us.' A good studio will propose the right solution. If you already know the exact solution, you are writing a specification, not a brief — which is fine, but it is a different document.
The question most people skip
The most important question in any brief is also the one most clients leave unanswered: what does the person you are trying to reach actually care about, and why should they choose you over the alternative?
If you can answer that clearly, the rest of the brief almost writes itself. If you cannot, that is the conversation to have before the project starts — with your team, your best clients, or a strategist who can help you find the answer. A studio can build you a beautiful, fast, well-structured website. It cannot invent the reason someone should care about your business.
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