The brief

Asking so that someone else can do it without you

Almost everything that went wrong for me when delegating went wrong before anyone started. I asked in one line, with my mind on something else, and what I knew stayed with me.

Today I work with AI agents that build software, and they have a property that makes this very visible: whoever takes the work starts cold. They weren't in the conversation, they don't know what I ruled out, they can't read my face. They get what I wrote and nothing else.

With a person it is the same; you just notice it less, because a person fills the gaps with what they think you meant, and sometimes they are right.

So I stopped asking and started writing briefs. A brief answers five things:

• What will be different. The effect someone could see, not the task.
• Where. The place where the change happens, already located.
• How it gets checked. What I will look at to know it is done.
• What is out. The edge of what doesn't belong.
• Whether it is decided. Or whether the first thing to deliver is the decision.

An example. I recently bought a domain, and what I had in my head was one line: connect the new domain.

That line can be read three ways: the domain gets a page of its own, it opens the application, or it leads to the page that already exists. All three are reasonable. Whoever receives it will pick one and do it well. That is the uncomfortable part of a vague request: it doesn't come back badly done. It comes back well done, and it is something else.

What I ended up writing was this:

What will be different: whoever types the domain lands on the page that says what the product is and what it costs.

Where: in the domain's settings, plus a link on the download page.

How it gets checked: open the domain and see that it lands there.

Out: a page of its own for the domain; email on that domain; changing the text of the page.

It is decided.

The line about what is out did half the work. I didn't know the domain wasn't going to have a page of its own when I started writing; I decided it there. That is what the form is for: writing the brief is where you find out you hadn't decided yet.

And the last line asks for honesty. If I mark as decided something that isn't, someone will deliver the wrong version with complete confidence. When in doubt, I say it still needs deciding: one extra round costs less than work done wrong.

You don't need any software to try this. Next time you ask someone for something, write the five things before you send it. If there is one you can't write, it wasn't time to ask yet.

This is how I work, and it is the first thing I teach. If you would like to see it on your own project, the first call is free: book it.