The Brief
At the beginning of a project the design lead or product manager will write a brief, a document that summarizes what the team needs to start working. The format and name of this document varies wildly, but the two key goals are the same: establish a common understanding of the work and inspire the team.
More specifically, the brief:
- States the organization’s vision, mission, and strategy.
- States the desired outcomes of the project.
- Summarizes research on the market, customers, and competition.
- States the constraints in terms of time, money, technology, and other resources.
- Describes the scope of work.
One template that might be useful here is The Lean Plan Template.
Or if you’re in a heavy agile/Jira situation, check out the product requirements blueprint.
There is an art to describing the scope that defines the work narrowly enough to accomplish the project goal and yet broadly enough to invite new, creative solutions. Let’s pretend we have a project where the existing customer research revealed that ordering speed is the prime problem with the app, along with a few other smaller problems that also hurt customers’ feelings of satisfaction.
For our pretend project this scope might be too narrow: Redesign the Vandelay mobile app with 5 screens instead of 10 and include a search feature. This scope description preemptively defines the design outcome using arbitrary specifications, thereby short-circuiting the design work.
This scope might be too broad: Enable Vandelay customers to order latex at any time from anywhere. This could be a good brief for an exploratory innovation project, but a broad scope description like this would generate many product ideas very different than redesigning a mobile app, and might not solve the problems identified by the research.
For our imaginary project, this scope is just right: Redesign the Vandalay mobile app to increase ordering speed by 50% and increase customer satisfaction 100%. This defines specific product goals that connect with design goals. It is broad enough to allow the designers to explore creative solutions and narrow enough to focus them on the desired outcomes.
