before we build · the brief
The Brief
Discovery produced an understanding. The brief is how that understanding is recorded precisely enough to survive the crossings that follow.
Not a requirements document. Not a specification. A record of what the team actually knows about a problem — in the order that makes the understanding cumulative rather than flat. A developer who reads a brief and a developer who reads only acceptance criteria are starting from fundamentally different positions.
Why the format exists and why the order matters
The brief is not a standard. It arrived at its shape by asking what each part needs from the part before it to be written honestly. The order is causal.
- The Experience Snapshot must come before The Journey — the journey is drawn from the observed experience, and you cannot map phases of an activity you have not witnessed.
- The Journey must come before What We Learned — the learning is the meaning extracted from the evidence, and it requires the evidence to exist first.
- What We Learned must come before Decisions — decisions made before the meaning is extracted tend to be the ones the team had already made before observing anything.
- Decisions must come before the Prediction — the prediction tests the decisions, not the other way around.
Remove any section and you do not just lose its content — you lose the constraint it placed on the section that depended on it. Without the Experience Snapshot, the Journey becomes a diagram of assumptions. Without the Journey, What We Learned becomes a list of opinions. Without What We Learned, Decisions become the solution the team wanted to build before they observed anything.
Both the Feature Brief and the Technical Design Brief share the same seven parts. The content of the Experience Snapshot and The Journey differs between them. The requirement in the Prediction that technical briefs name both a technical metric and a human signal is different. Everything else is the same.
A brief that a developer reads before the first sprint should let them answer three questions without asking anyone:
- What problem is being solved and for whom?
- What did the trio choose and what did they reject?
- What is predicted to change and when will someone check?
If any of the three cannot be answered from the brief, it is not ready.