The most common worry we hear is "I'm not technical, I don't know how to describe what I need." You only have to answer four questions.
- Date
- Reading
- 4 min read
- Written by
- Nick Li
- Tags
- #Process#Communication
At the start of nearly every project, a client will say, slightly apologetically, "I'm not very technical, so I might not explain this well." In practice, the most useful briefs we receive contain no technical vocabulary at all.
Four questions
-
What happens today? Describe the current process or situation as concretely as you can. "Customers enquire on WhatsApp, a colleague replies by hand and copies the details into Excel" is far more useful than "we need a CRM".
-
Where does it hurt? Is it slow? Error-prone? Repetitive? Does nobody know where the latest version lives?
-
What does success look like? Three months from now, what should be different? Describe it in measurable terms wherever possible.
-
What are the constraints? Budget, timing, systems that must stay, rules that must be followed.
Leave the technical decisions to us
Which framework, database or cloud service to use is our responsibility. Yours is to be clear about the business problem and the goal. We translate that into a solution and explain every trade-off in language you can follow.
That is one of the core beliefs at 01S Tech: plain talk. If a solution cannot be explained in everyday language, the problem is probably with the solution.