You can start with one honest sentence. For example:
"We run a pizza chain and phone orders are slowing us down. We need digital ordering that is faster and cleaner."
That is enough to kick off a serious conversation with app developers and ux designers. You can fill in the rest together. Clarity and honesty beat fancy slide decks every time.
Why Feature Lists Kill Projects
Weak briefs obsess over screens, buttons and trends. They ignore the reason those things should exist.
Your team needs to know:
- What KPIs you are chasing
- If they are building a proof of concept, an MVP, or something that must scale from day one
Founders who already went through a funding round usually write better briefs. They know their market, they know where the pain is and they know who their early adopters are. That gives app developers and ux design services something solid to design around.
What A Buildable Brief Actually Contains
Pixelfield’s ideal app brief is a compact document that covers:
- Who the company is and what it actually does
- What the product is and why anyone should care
- What kind of help you want from app developers and ux design services
- What success looks like in numbers, not vibes
- Current problems, risks and constraints
If your product touches both web and mobile, say how web development and mobile app development should work together. If your brand is still visually all over the place, Pixelfield’s ux design services in London can lock in a consistent look and feel across platforms before anyone ships new features.
When Your Brief Is A Mess
Perfect briefs do not exist. The real job is to pull out what matters and expose what is missing.
Risky assumptions need to be flagged fast. The process depends on how far you got on your own. Sometimes the team can clean it up in a workshop. Sometimes you need a deeper discovery phase.
If you show up with nothing but a feature wishlist and no defined target user, you should run a validation stage before any serious development. Otherwise you are paying app developers to guess.
Data, Not Opinions
Existing products often fail right at the briefing stage because nobody is tracking behavior properly. Bad or missing data destroys clarity.
Your product team needs to see:
- Where users drop off
- Where performance is slowing them down
- Where onboarding or flows are confusing
Smart fixes follow numbers, not gut feelings. Experienced app developers and ux designers will refuse to start building without a defined problem and a measurable goal. If those do not exist yet, the first step is to define them together, not to push code.
Do This Before You Open A Google Doc
Before you type the first line of your brief, do three things:
- Write down the exact problem you are solving and your rough idea of how you will solve it.
- Look at alternatives that already exist and why they win or lose.
- Fill in a one page lean canvas to check if the business side is not fantasy.
If the app already exists, attach a short report with current metrics and obvious bottlenecks. Show where users are struggling and where you want help from app developers and ux design services.
One Brutal Piece Of Advice
Do not hide behind fake detail. Do not ask ChatGPT to spit out a 10 page spec and then treat it like gospel. One wrong core assumption and the entire plan tilts.
Sit down, think, and fill out a lean canvas that proves the idea makes sense as a business. Then write a tight brief on top of that.
Reality Check
A short review with people who do this daily is cheaper than a rebuild in six months.
Serious app work is a mix of product strategy, ux design, data and engineering. No founder covers all of that perfectly on their own. Before you burn budget on a half baked idea, get someone who lives in app development to push on your assumptions and stress test your brief.