“We want something like Booking, but for our industry” — a brief that guarantees the three quotes you receive will be incomparable and all of them wrong. A good brief is half a page and five parts.
The five parts of a good brief
1. The problem in one sentence: who loses time or money, and where. 2. Today's state: how it is handled now, spreadsheets and workarounds included. 3. Success in numbers: “an order goes through without a phone call”, “processing drops from 3 days to 3 hours”. 4. Constraints: systems to integrate with, deadlines, a budget band. 5. What is NOT included: one sentence that prevents half of all misunderstandings.
What does not belong in a brief
Technology choices (“we want it in React”) — you are buying an outcome, not a framework. Finished screens from Canva — they block better solutions. And a budget of “we'll see from the offers”: without a band you will get quotes from €8k to €200k and learn nothing.
A brief is a living document, not stone
A good brief is not written once and locked in a drawer — it is refined in discovery, when the vendor asks questions you hadn't thought of. That is not a failure of the brief, it is its purpose: cheap paper iterations instead of expensive changes in finished code. The best brief is the one that triggers the right questions.
How to compare offers against the brief
Send the same brief to three vendors and their offers suddenly become comparable — and they differ not only in price but in questions and assumptions. A vendor who asks about edge cases and spells out what is not in scope is already showing you, in the proposal, how they will work. So the brief is not just a spec — it is a test of the vendor.
With a brief like this you can collect three comparable quotes in a week. Or drop it into our configurator and have a price band in sixty seconds — the brief stays useful either way, you will need it in discovery.