How to write a software project brief that saves tens of thousands

“We want something like Booking, but for our industry.” A brief like that guarantees the quotes you receive will be impossible to compare — and all wrong. A good brief is half a page long and has five parts. And it doesn’t have to be written by a technical person.

Five parts of a good brief

1. 01The problem in one sentence: who is losing time or money, and where.
2. 02The current state: how it’s handled today, including spreadsheets and workarounds.
3. 03What success looks like, in numbers: “an order goes through without a phone call”, “processing drops from three days to three hours”.
4. 04Constraints: systems it must connect to, deadlines and a budget range.
5. 05What’s out of scope: one sentence that prevents half the misunderstandings.

An example of a half-page brief

With a brief like this, you can compare not only the price in the quotes but also how well each vendor understands the problem. It’s an illustrative example, but this is exactly what the briefs behind good custom software look like.

What doesn’t belong in a brief

Technology decisions like “we want it built in React”. You’re buying an outcome, not a tool. Finished screens drawn in a presentation, which needlessly rule out better solutions. And a budget of “we’ll see from the quotes”: without a range you’ll get quotes from eight thousand to two hundred thousand and learn nothing.

A brief is a living document

A good brief isn’t written once and locked in a drawer. It gets refined in the initial analysis, when the vendor asks questions you hadn’t thought of. That isn’t a failure of the brief but its purpose: cheap changes on paper instead of expensive changes in a finished system. The best brief is the one that prompts the right questions.

How to compare quotes against the brief

When you send the same brief to three vendors, their quotes suddenly become comparable. And they differ not just in price but in their questions and assumptions. A vendor who asks about edge cases and spells out what’s out of scope is already showing you in the quote how they’ll work. So a brief isn’t just a brief. It’s also a test of the vendor.

No time to write? No problem.

We don’t need a finished brief from you. A few sentences about what’s holding you back are enough, and we’ll ask the questions the brief grows out of. Get in touch and we’ll reply within 24 hours with questions and a suggested next step.