The Living Project Brief
Talented people guess in expensive directions.
Nobody sets out to write a thin brief. But when the context lives in one person’s head and the objectives got listed instead of ranked, the work starts anyway. Your team doesn’t stop and wait for clarity. They fill the gap with their best guess and get to work.
That’s the part that costs money. Not bad work -- confident, well-made, technically excellent work, pointed slightly wrong. You find out in round two. Sometimes round three.
So we’re giving away the brief we use on every Sageworx engagement. Not a summary of it. The actual document, with the questions we actually ask.
Editable Word document. Sixteen key questions to answer. No form, no gate, no drip sequence.
What’s inside
Sixteen sections. Most templates stop at the obvious ones and call it thorough. The rest are where projects are actually won and lost.
The setup
- Client
- Overview + backgroundThe situation, the business context, the category, the competition.
- The assignmentWhat are you asking us to make, and why?
The thinking
- Who we’re talking toWhich segment, and what is their journey?
- ObjectivesWhat must this achieve? Ranked, in order of importance.
- Key communicationIf only one message survives, which one?
- What we want them to doKnow something, buy, share, go somewhere?
The constraints
- MandatoriesWhat must be included, and who decided that?
- Creative considerations
- Technical considerationsPlatforms, CRM, device, responsive.
- Known channels + tactics
The plan
- TimingAnd is it tied to something external?
- Budget
- DeliverablesWhat exactly, and in what format?
- How will we be measured?
- ResourcesPartners, roles, hours.
A section you can’t fill in isn’t a failure. It’s the next conversation, found early and cheap instead of late and expensive.
A brief written for sign-off hedges everything and ranks nothing. A brief written for the team says “we don’t know that yet, and it’s question one.”
Why we call it living
Most briefs are accurate the day they’re written and quietly wrong by week four. Timelines move. Budgets change. The audience insight everyone nodded at gets contradicted by real data.
Ours gets updated every time a conversation changes a decision. So at every review we can go back to it and check whether we did what we said we’d do. Someone who joins in week six reads one document and is current.
This isn’t the only way to do it
We’ve spent decades writing briefs, receiving briefs, and rebuilding briefs that didn’t survive contact with the work. This is where that’s brought us, and it’s the right place for us to start.
It isn’t finished and it isn’t a standard. So: what’s in yours that isn’t in ours? What do you always need from a brief and consistently never get?
Tell us. We’re writing about it next.
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