Before the day · Page 28
Write it alone, test it on one person
For you only
The process, which is short on purpose.
One person owns the challenge. You, maybe with one other person, the week before. Not a group exercise, and definitely not the opening activity of the day itself. This is wartime, not democracy. Open the day with a group debate about the problem and you will still be debating it at lunch.
Owning it alone does not mean writing it from your own head. Steal language first. Fifteen minutes with one salesperson, twenty support tickets skimmed, one churn interview reread. You are hunting for the customer's words, the moment, the verbatim complaint. The drafting is solitary. The ingredients are not.
Then run three checks.
The one-person test, the only one I insist on. Read the brief to someone who was not involved in writing it. Two things can happen. They start picturing things to build, "oh, so something that...", and you are ready. Or they ask "build what, exactly?", and you tighten. It is in this book because it is the cheapest honest test I know.
The divergence test. Imagine three teams reading your brief. If you cannot imagine them building three different products, the brief is too tight. If you cannot imagine scoring their three pitches against it, it is too loose.
The calendar test. Can you name, today, five reachable people who roughly match your user? If not, change the user or change the challenge. This one feels bureaucratic and saves the whole afternoon.
PRO TIPS
- Write five versions of the brief, read them out loud, and keep the one you can say in one breath.
- Draft in the customer's words, not your roadmap's words. "I never know if my invoice got seen" beats "payment status visibility".
- Put a number in the goal. 90 seconds, two minutes, one visit. The number is what turns judging from taste into observation.
- Do not chase the perfect sentence. The middle is a band, not a point. Get in the band and go recruit testers.
Anyone can write a prompt. Not everyone can write a brief.