The single highest-leverage investment in any project is the brief. Most teams spend two days on it. We spend two weeks. Here is why it changes everything.
In 2022, during our first year as a studio, we lost a significant project not because our design was bad, but because we solved the wrong problem elegantly. The client had asked for a redesigned onboarding flow. We delivered a beautiful one. But the actual problem — the one we would have discovered if we had pushed harder during discovery — was that new users were not reaching onboarding because the landing page messaging was misaligned with their actual motivations. We redesigned the wrong thing.
What a Real Brief Looks Like
Since then, we have developed what we call the Obsidian Brief — a document that is not just a scope of work but a shared theory of change. It answers: What is the business outcome we are trying to move? What are the user behaviors that drive that outcome? What do we currently know, and what are we assuming? What would falsify our assumptions? What does success look like in 90 days, and what would make this project a failure?
“A brief that cannot be wrong is not a brief — it is a wish list. We write briefs that can be proven false, because those are the only ones worth following.”
The Two-Week Investment
We spend the first two weeks of every engagement on nothing but the brief. We interview stakeholders. We talk to users. We audit analytics. We map assumptions. By the end, the brief is a living document that everyone — client and studio — has signed off on not just as a scope, but as a shared understanding of the problem. This means that when we diverge from the original ask, we can show our reasoning. And we diverge often, because the brief almost always reveals that the original ask was a symptom rather than a solution.
- Define the business outcome first, before any creative direction
- Distinguish between what clients ask for and what they actually need
- Document assumptions explicitly — they are your risk register
- Establish success metrics before starting any design work
- Get explicit sign-off from all stakeholders on the brief, not just the statement of work