A project brief template that gets useful answers

Most intake forms ask questions clients can't actually answer yet (“what's your target audience,” “what's your brand personality”), and get vague answers back that don't help scope anything. This is the order that gets real answers instead, because each question only needs information the client already has.

1. 1 What exists right now, and what’s wrong with it? (Or, if nothing exists yet: what's the one thing this needs to do?)
2. 2 Who is this actually for, described as a real recent interaction, not a demographic. (“The person who emailed us last week asking X” beats “millennials interested in wellness.”)
3. 3 What happens after someone uses this, that wasn't happening before? This is the loop question from MVP scoping, asked from the client's side.
4. 4 What's the real deadline, and what's driving it? A launch tied to a real external event scopes very differently than “as soon as possible.”
5. 5 What's already been tried, and why didn't it work? Almost always the most useful question in the whole brief, and almost never asked.
6. 6 What would make this a failure, even if it technically launches on time? Surfaces the actual success criteria faster than asking what success looks like directly.