Guide #005: How to use a product brief to drive unity and innovation within your organization

Writing a product brief shouldn’t be a solo endeavor. Include other people on your team, or outside of your team, to help complement your perspective and provide feedback. These people may end up working on the project or simply just provide input on the brief. Nevertheless, seeking a diverse range of advisers will help you start off on the right foot and help ensure you’re solving the right problem.

The purpose of the product brief should be to define the goals you want to achieve or the problems you want to solve— start with a clear business goal or customer problem. Utilize S.M.A.R.T., OKRs or any framework you're comfortable with to craft your goal statement. Keep your overview concise and link out for additional information like evidence, research, data, etc. Give your team the opportunity to analyze the goal and determine their own sub-goals. Let them gain alignment by building a correlation between the business goal and user goals. Seek feedback on the goal statement from stakeholders outside of your team.

When using an established product brief template, fill in as many sections as you can but don’t let missing sections constrain your progress. Again, in the beginning your goal should be to provide enough information to align your team. You can also consult with your team to gauge how much information they will need to be productive.

As new insights and opportunities emerge, record them in the product brief. Use the product brief to represent an historical record of how the project evolved. This gives the team a single document to refer to for gauging progress or even resetting. This also gives the product brief additional utility as a training tool for new employees as well as reference documentation when starting other projects.

Proactively share your product briefs within your organization or make them easily accessible to anyone who might be curious. Give yourself the opportunity to benefit from the experiences of others outside of your product team by letting them know what you’re working on. Include a point-of-contact on the product brief.