Constructing
Product
Nobody with a new idea has a specification. Here is what a builder actually needs from you instead — and why the rough version beats the polished one.
You have an idea. It has been going round for weeks. You can explain it to a friend in about four minutes, and every time you sit down to write it out properly it turns into either three lines or eleven pages. Neither feels sendable. So it stays in your notes app.
This is not a writing problem. A brief is a document for a builder who already knows what they are building. You are not there yet. Nobody with a new idea is there yet. What you can write is something more useful than a brief, and it takes about ten minutes.
A brief describes a solution. What you have is a problem. Send the problem.
When we read a first message, we are trying to answer five questions. Not one of them is “what are the features”. Say something about each and you have told us more than most briefs do.
You do not have to answer them in order, or in full. “I don’t know” is a valid answer to any of them, and it tells us where to start.
These are the things people send because they think they should. None of them is useless, but they belong later, and sent first they tend to hide the idea rather than show it.
A polished description has already made decisions. It has chosen a name, a shape, a first screen, a set of features. Every one of those was a guess, made before anyone who builds things was in the room — and once written down, a guess tends to survive. A rough description does not have that problem. It still carries the doubt, and the doubt is where the useful conversation is.
A rambling voice note in which you contradict yourself twice tells a builder more than a tidy paragraph does, because the contradictions are where the real decisions live. “It’s for landlords — well, letting agents — well, maybe both” is not a mess. It is the first product decision, said out loud, and it is exactly the kind of thing we are for.
Polish hides the decisions that have not been made. Rough shows them.
Open whatever you write in. Do not give it a title. Answer the five questions above in whatever order they come, in whatever words they come, and stop when you run out. If typing is the obstacle, record it instead: talk for four minutes as if to a friend who asks good questions. Then send it, before you re-read it. Re-reading is where the polish gets in.
It will not read like a brief. That is the point. A brief is what comes back the other way, once somebody has read what you sent and worked out what it actually is.