A good brief = a short quote in 24-48h. A weak brief = 2 weeks of discovery calls, frustration, the project often falls apart before start. This guide shows what a brief that a vendor can quote without gymnastics looks like.
A brief does not have to be long. It has to be concrete. 1 page with 10 fields is 10× more useful than a 20-page spec full of "flexible scalable platform".
01 · What exactly do you want to automate
Describe the process you want to replace. Concretely. Not "customer service" — but "copying 47 leads daily from Hubspot to Pipedrive with different mapping logic per client country".
Test: would a junior programmer after reading the brief know what to do? If not — clarify.
02 · Where data comes from, where it goes
List of sources and destinations:
- Sources: websites (URLs), API endpoints, forms, files, emails
- Destinations: CRM (which), database (which), Slack (which channels), email, file
If scraping: 5-15 concrete example URLs of targets. The vendor looking at them rates complexity in 10 min.
03 · Frequency and scale
Concrete numbers:
- Frequency: daily / hourly / real-time / on-demand
- Scale: how many products / leads / entries per run
- Peak: are there spikes (e.g. Black Friday)
- Latency: how fast you need the result (seconds / minutes / hours)
Scale 100 vs 100,000 SKUs = different stack, different price, different timeline. Do not beat around the bush.
04 · What you do manually now
Shows where it hurts (and allows ROI estimate). 3-5 sentence description:
"An assistant daily 1-1.5h checks 12 listing portals, copies 30-50 leads to Notion, deduplicates manually. 50% of leads are redundant because already checked earlier."
From this the vendor sees: scope, current pain, expected value. A sensible quote follows within hours.
05 · Decision logic — what triggers action
Automation is not just "take data → put data". Usually there are rules:
- "If price dropped >5% — push to Slack #price-alerts"
- "If lead has email from blacklisted domain — skip"
- "If stock <3 units — alert + pause auto-reorder"
List all conditions. Better now than in sprint 2 when the rule "but only on business days" got remembered only in production.
06 · What you already have
Technical stack:
- Hosting (AWS / Azure / own server / nothing)
- Databases (Postgres / MongoDB / Notion / Sheets)
- Existing integrations (CRM, ERP, own API)
- Auth/SSO requirements
Affects whether we build from scratch or integrate with existing. Price difference = 2-5×.
07 · Budget and timeline
Most often skipped section. "Tell us what you have" is counter-productive.
Give ranges:
- Setup budget: e.g. €3-8k, €15-30k, €50k+
- Retainer budget: e.g. €300-800/month, €1-3k/month
- Timeline: when you want it in production
The vendor will scope accordingly. If the budget is unrealistic for requirements — you will know before signing, not after 4 weeks.
08 · Stakeholders and decision makers
Who will use the system (operations team, marketing, sales)? Who signs the contract (CEO, CTO, CFO)? Who is responsible for onboarding?
Without this the vendor talks at the discovery call with an assistant who "will pass it on". The quote rolls into delays.
09 · Constraints and no-go
Concrete facts that affect the solution:
- Compliance (GDPR, AML, HIPAA, SOX)
- Data residency ("must be in EU")
- Vendor list ("we already use AWS, prefer there")
- Hard no ("never OpenAI", "never Chinese providers")
Specifics upfront save 2-3 iterations. "We already use Hubspot" eliminates 5 alternatives.
10 · Success metrics
How will we measure project success?
- "Manual work for this process <1h/week" (vs 11h/week now)
- "We react to price changes within <15 min" (vs 2-3 days now)
- "90% of leads pre-screened before reaching sales"
Without this it is unclear what "works" means. With it — clear accept/reject criterion for every deliverable.
Bonus: 5 minutes on an email
A brief does not have to be a formal RFP. An email with 10 paragraphs (one per point) is 100% sufficient for most projects. Time budget: 30-60 min for first draft. ROI: vendors reply in 24h instead of 2 weeks.
The point
A weak brief is a signal that the client does not know what they need. A good vendor catches this and either: a) asks for clarification (delay), b) quotes high-range for safety (kills budget). A concrete 1-page brief = a concrete offer in 24h. Most of our active clients went through this template — it works for years.