What to put in your app brief (and what to leave out)

People overthink the brief. They spend weeks writing a spec document with user personas, competitive analysis, feature matrices, and wireframes for screens they have not validated yet. Or they go the other direction and send a single sentence: "I want an app like Uber but for dog walking."

Neither extreme helps. Here's what actually moves a project forward.

Start with the problem, not the solution

The most useful thing you can tell a developer is what problem your app solves and for whom. Not "I want a dashboard with charts." Instead: "Our field technicians waste 20 minutes per job filling out paper forms, and the data never makes it back to the office."

That problem statement tells us more than a wireframe would. It tells us who uses the app (field technicians, not desk workers), where they use it (on site, probably on a phone, possibly without cell service), and what "done" looks like (the data reaches the office).

Describe the happy path

Walk through one complete use of the app, from opening it to closing it. This doesn't need to be formal. A paragraph works fine:

"A technician arrives at the job site, opens the app, sees today's assigned jobs. They tap a job, fill out the inspection form, take a few photos, mark it complete. The office sees the completed job and the photos immediately."

That's five screens, one API, a camera integration, and a real-time sync layer. From this paragraph alone, we can build a working prototype.

List the non-obvious requirements

Every app has a few requirements that aren't visible from the happy path:

• Offline support. Does the app need to work without internet? This changes the architecture significantly.
• Existing systems. Does it need to talk to your CRM, your ERP, your scheduling tool? Name the specific system and whether it has an API.
• User roles. Is there one type of user or several? A technician and an office manager see different things.
• Compliance. Healthcare, finance, and construction have specific data handling rules. Mention them early.

What you can skip

You don't need wireframes. We'll show you real screens faster than a designer can produce mockups. You don't need user personas. You know your users; tell us about them in plain language. You don't need a competitive analysis. If your competitor's app is relevant, send us a link and tell us what you like and dislike about it.

You don't need to specify the technology stack. That's our job. You hired a builder; let us pick the tools.

If you've a quote from another firm

Send it along. Not to undercut them, but because their quote tells us something useful: it shows what scope they understood, what timeline they estimated, and what price they set. We'll tell you where we agree and where we would do things differently.

Our projects typically come in at half the cost and a fifth of the timeline. Not because we cut corners, but because we eliminated the process overhead that inflates both.

The format doesn't matter

Bullet points, a paragraph, a voice memo transcript, a Notion doc, a napkin sketch you photographed. Any of these works. The content matters more than the format.

If you've an existing codebase, share the GitHub repo. We'll read the code and tell you what we would keep, what we would replace, and how long the work would take.

The best brief is an honest one. Tell us what you want, what you know, and what you're unsure about. We'll figure out the rest.