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Projects rarely fail in the build. They fail in the brief — in the quiet gap between what a client meant and what an agency heard. By the time that gap becomes visible, you are three rounds of revisions deep, the budget is strained, and everybody is being very polite with each other.
A good brief is the highest-leverage hour you will spend on the entire project. Here is how to write one.
Lead with the business problem, not the deliverable
“We need a new website” is not a problem. It is a solution you have already chosen, and it forecloses the conversation before it starts.
“We get decent traffic but almost nobody books a demo” is a problem. So is “our sales team keeps answering the same three objections on every call.” So is “we are attracting the wrong kind of enquiry.”
Start there, ideally with numbers. A good agency may well tell you that a full rebuild is not the answer — that you need three new pages and better copy, not fifteen pages and a redesign. That honesty is worth more than an enthusiastic yes.
Define what success actually looks like
Be concrete and, if possible, numerical. More qualified leads. Higher average order value. Shorter sales cycle. Fewer support emails. Enquiries from companies above a certain size.
“Modern and clean” is not a goal. It is a preference — and preferences are the most expensive thing in the world to chase without a target, because they are unfalsifiable. Nobody can tell you when you have arrived.
If you cannot name a measurable outcome, you will end up judging the work on taste. And taste-based revision cycles are where budgets go to die.
Share the unglamorous context
This is the section clients almost always skip, and it is the most valuable one.
- Who actually buys from you — not your ideal customer profile, but the people who genuinely sign.
- Why they hesitate — the objections your sales team hears on every call.
- What your customers actually say — in their words, not your marketing’s.
- Which pages people really use — pull the analytics. It is usually not the ones you assume.
- What you have already tried — and what happened.
This is the raw material that makes copy persuasive. Most clients guard it, or assume it is not relevant. It is the most relevant thing you have.
Bring your constraints early
Budget
Withholding your budget to “see what they come back with” feels shrewd. It is not. It guarantees you receive a proposal that solves the wrong-sized problem, and it wastes weeks for both sides.
A range is fine. “Somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five, depending on scope” lets an agency propose something real. Without it they are guessing, and they will usually guess low and cut the strategic work — the part you actually needed.
Timeline
Say if there is a hard date and what is driving it. A funding announcement, a trade show, a product launch. A real deadline changes what is possible and helps an agency sequence the work.
Decision-makers
Name who signs off, and how many people need to agree. This single line saves more projects than any other. A brief that has not been agreed internally will be re-litigated halfway through the build, and everything after that point costs double.
Technical and brand rules
The CRM it must integrate with. The CMS your team can actually use. The brand guidelines that are genuinely fixed versus the ones that are open. Constraints are not limitations — they are the shape of the problem.
Say what you do not want
Sites you dislike are as informative as sites you admire, often more so. Naming a competitor whose website feels wrong to you — and articulating why — tells an agency more about your judgement than any mood board.
Be specific. “Too corporate” is vague. “It reads like it was written by a committee and I do not believe a word of it” is useful.
What a good agency will ask you back
Treat the questions you receive as a diagnostic. A serious agency will want to know:
- What one new customer is worth to you
- What has changed in the business that makes this urgent now
- Who you lose deals to, and why
- What you would consider a failure, not just a success
- Who internally is likely to disagree with this project
If nobody asks anything like this before quoting, you are being sold a production job. That may be all you need — but you should know that is what you are buying.
The brief template, in six lines
If you write nothing else, write these:
- The problem: what is not working, with a number attached.
- The outcome: what would have to be true in six months for this to have been worth it.
- The audience: who buys, and what stops them.
- The constraints: budget range, deadline, technical must-haves.
- The decision: who signs off, and by when.
- The anti-brief: what you specifically do not want.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Every hour of ambiguity at the start becomes a week of revisions at the end. The brief is not administrative overhead standing between you and the interesting part — it is the interesting part, because it is where the actual decisions get made.
Spend the hour. It is the cheapest hour in the entire project, and it is the one that determines whether the rest of them are worth anything.
