A project brief and a feature brief both serve the same purpose; however, a feature brief is more suited for businesses (and roadmaps) that are more focused on continuous innovation for products rather than on tasks related to operations, sales, and marketing.
Another important contrast is that the feature brief starts out as a separate document, but it eventually becomes incorporated into the product documentation, whereas project briefs are typically preserved or thrown away once the project has been finished.
Along with the context for why the project is necessary ("why now?") and any pertinent data that may already be known or decided about the project, project briefs record the planned outcome of the project. This is something that your roadmap should also and already communicate.
The provision of a standardized and transferable point of entry for all project contributors is one of the primary reasons why effective project kick-offs are made possible by feature briefs. We ensure that everyone can get briefed consistently, and we enable the kind of asynchronous communication that is required for modern organizations and distributed teams to thrive.
When you get further along in the production process, it is easy to lose sight of the reasons why the project is vital. Feature briefs remind you of these reasons, which can be easily forgotten.
Someone who is more junior and whose role is primarily tactical and who, as a result, tends to be more solutions-oriented in their thinking and in their day-to-day activities is not as well suited to the task of translating strategic objectives into the scaffolding for actionable plans as an individual with a split perspective.
While producing a feature brief, it is important to combine goals, established requirements, and data insights obtained from key stakeholders and resources in other departments such as sales, marketing, customer support, and engineering. Make sure to include the following 5 sections to ensure that your briefing document is comprehensive:
This area is for supplying information regarding the backdrop. You should use this section to provide context for why this feature or project was recognized and prioritized on the roadmap.
Provide a high-level description of the feature or the solution. Put more emphasis on how the solution will solve the problem or how the user will benefit from using the solution, rather than on how the features will specifically look or function.
Establishing objectives helps to define goals, recognize activities that conflict with one another, direct aspects of the decision-making process, and guarantee that employees within an organization are held accountable for their actions. Goal displacement is a common problem that arises when goals and supporting objectives are not clearly stated. One's core values impact the establishment of goals and objectives.
They offer a clearly defined standard against which to judge a company's performance and productivity. Managers can determine whether or not employees are fulfilling their particular goals, which contribute to the general goals of the organization.
You can either state the known specifics here or include a workflow diagram or sketch if you already have some basic thoughts about how the solution will operate. Describe how the solution might or should seem and which user interface components and guidelines should be followed, if relevant. Describe how the solution might or should look. Include hyperlinks to visual references like wireframes and mockups, or even better, embed reference images right into this area of the document.
Describe the most important performance criteria here as well. For instance, the page needs to load in less than two seconds, the website needs to be compatible with Google Chrome versions x and higher, and the server needs to be able to host as many as 100,000 concurrent users within a single session. Always remember that you should play to your strengths and phrase any aspects you are unsure of as questions rather than requirements!
Please specify who will benefit from using this solution. Isthis one of your clients? Your employees? Does a particular subset of usersmake up a larger population overall? If your company's marketing or userresearch teams have generated persona documents, this is an excellent place tolink to them or reference them here.
Develop a profile of your target customer and specify thetype of user that will benefit from your feature. For instance, if you are developing a data application, the best customers for your product would be theDevOps team's leaders and project managers. Your team's ability to keep the enduser in mind throughout the development process will be greatly improved if you provide them with an understanding of your potential customers. Use our Customer Persona builder inside HolaBrief for free!
At this early stage in the planning process for a feature, the creationof a timeline is a difficult problem; nonetheless, even estimates can assiststakeholders in visualizing the feature's breadth. Get a basic understanding ofwhat phases you need to move through and what tasks team members need to do toattain feature completion. Even if your timeframe may alter once you completeyour development plan, this is important information to have.
In addition to this, it needs to address the question of how the outcomeshould be presented. Is it just a straightforward Word document that the writere-mails to you, or should they instead submit it to your briefing platform,such as HolaBrief, which enables you to simply upload files?
The production of a product featurebrief that is both well-written and well-written takes time, effort, andcollaboration. You now have access to tried-and-true brief templates as aresult of the years of research we conducted with thousands of different organizations.Using HolaBrief to construct your feature brief within a dynamic documentallows for a far higher level of productivity in this step.
Before the brief is utilizedas a guide for the writers or before it is delivered to the client for review,each department can simultaneously add to, comment on, and amend differentsections of the document. Because your customers do not even need to registeran account to provide feedback using HolaBrief, collecting that feedback has neverbeen simpler.
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