The brief that isn't a brief

The document arrives with a promising name and two pages of goals. «We want a more modern website». «We need a rebrand». «We're looking for more presence on social». What rarely arrives is the question behind it: why now, what changed, what happens if nothing is done.

Start with the symptom

We spend the first meeting on something that looks like a waste of time: not talking about the job. We talk about the business. Who buys, who doesn't and why, what gets said on sales calls, which sentence the client repeats when explaining what they do. That's usually where the real problem lives, and it almost never matches the brief's title.

A brief describes what someone thinks they need. A well-posed problem describes what's costing them money.

— Sors

Once the problem shows up, the job changes shape. The «more modern website» turns out to be a value proposition nobody grasps in ten seconds. The «rebrand» is a catalogue that can't tell three product lines apart. And sometimes the answer is that what was asked for isn't needed at all, but something much smaller and much more urgent is.

We rewrite the brief together, on one page, and both sign it. It's the document everything else is measured against: every proposal, every review round, every «what if we tried…». It costs one meeting. It saves a project.