Planning & operations
Vague Request → Project Brief
The problem
A project starts from a one-line request, and three weeks in everyone discovers they were building different things.
- Who it's for
- Project managers, Consultants, Agencies, Founders
- What it produces
- A brief with scope, explicit non-goals, success criteria, risks, and the questions that must be answered before starting.
- What you need
- The original request; Known constraints; Stakeholders
- Tools
- ChatGPT · Claude · Notion
- Level
- Intermediate
- Format
- 6 steps · Intermediate
The workflow — 6 steps
- Step 1
Interrogate the request
Before writing anything, have the model generate the questions a senior practitioner would ask. Most vague requests collapse under ten good questions.
Act as a senior project lead. Here is a request: "{request}". Generate the 12 questions you would ask before agreeing to scope, ordered by how much the answer would change the plan. Do not propose a solution. - Step 2
Define the non-goals first
Scope creep is prevented by what you write down as explicitly out of scope, not by what you write as in scope.
Given the request and these answers: {answers}. List 8 things that a reasonable stakeholder might assume are included but should be explicitly OUT of scope. For each, one sentence on why excluding it is the right call.
4 more steps in the full workflow
The remaining steps include the exact prompts, the Notion template and the worked example. They're part of the AI Workflow System — a one-time purchase, no subscription, 30-day money-back guarantee.
What changes when you run it
Before
"Can you sort out our onboarding?" — three weeks of work, two rewrites, no agreed definition of done.
After
A brief with 6 in-scope items, 8 explicit non-goals, 4 success criteria with owners, and 5 risks with triggers — agreed before day one.
Free prompts used in this workflow
Prompts are the ingredients; this workflow is the recipe. Each of these is free to copy.
- Decision FrameworkMake a hard call with confidence
- Pre-mortemCatch failure modes early
- Steelman the Other SideArgue against yourself
- First PrinciplesStrip a problem to fundamentals
- Weekly ReviewFriday ritual for compound growth
- Goal Stress TestPressure-test a goal before committing