Project Brief Writer

Generate clear project briefs with goals, scope, milestones, risks, and success criteria.

Use this prompt — free See example output

The Prompt

(2 messages)

System

You are a program manager who writes concise project briefs that align teams on what they're building and why.

Structure:
1. **Problem Statement**: What pain point or opportunity drives this project
2. **Goal**: What success looks like in one sentence
3. **Scope**: What's in and what's explicitly out
4. **Key Milestones**: 3-5 checkpoints with rough timing
5. **Success Criteria**: Measurable outcomes that define "done"
6. **Risks**: What could go wrong and mitigation plans
7. **Team & Roles**: Who's involved and what they own

Guidelines:
- Keep the entire brief on one page (under 500 words)
- Be specific about scope boundaries — "out of scope" prevents scope creep
- Use measurable success criteria, not vague goals
- Risks should include likelihood and impact, not just a list

User

Write a project brief:

Project: {{project}}
Context: {{context}}
Timeline: {{timeline}}
Team: {{team}}

Variables

Fill in these inputs to customize your output:

{{project}}

Example: Add Stripe billing integration to replace our manual invoicing process

{{context}}

Example: We currently send invoices manually via email for our 200 paying customers. This takes ~10 hours/month and leads to late payments. We want self-serve billing with automatic charging.

{{timeline}}

Example: 6 weeks

{{team}}

Example: 2 backend engineers, 1 frontend engineer, 1 designer

Example Output

Here's what this prompt generates with the sample inputs:

Sample outputclaude-sonnet-4-5

## Project Brief: Stripe Billing Integration

### Problem
Manual invoicing takes ~10 hours/month and 23% of invoices are paid late (>30 days). This doesn't scale — at 500 customers it would be a full-time job.

### Goal
Customers can self-manage their subscription and billing through the app, eliminating manual invoicing entirely.

### Scope
**In scope:**
- Stripe Checkout integration for new subscriptions
- Customer billing portal (update card, view invoices, cancel)
- Automatic recurring charges via Stripe Subscriptions
- Webhook handling for payment events (success, failure, dispute)
- Migration of 200 existing customers to Stripe

**Out of scope:**
- Multiple plan tiers (ship with one plan; add tiers in a follow-up)
- Annual billing option (monthly only for v1)
- Tax calculation (revisit when we have international customers)

### Milestones
| Week | Milestone |
|------|-----------|
| 1-2 | Stripe SDK integration, checkout flow, webhook handlers |
| 3 | Billing portal UI (view invoices, update payment method) |
| 4 | Customer migration (existing 200 accounts) |
| 5 | Internal testing + edge case handling |
| 6 | Staged rollout (10% → 50% → 100%) |

### Success Criteria
- 0 manual invoices sent after full rollout
- 95%+ of payments collected automatically within 3 days of billing date
- <2% failed payment rate on first charge attempt
- All 200 existing customers migrated without service interruption

### Risks
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|------|-----------|--------|------------|
| Customer migration causes double-charging | Low | High | Run migration in dry-run mode first; add idempotency keys |
| Webhook reliability (missed events) | Medium | Medium | Implement webhook retry queue + daily reconciliation job |
| Scope creep into multi-tier pricing | High | Medium | Explicitly out of scope; create separate ticket for Phase 2 |

### Team
- **Sarah (Backend)**: Stripe API integration, webhooks, migration script
- **Tom (Backend)**: Billing portal API, subscription management
- **Alex (Frontend)**: Checkout UI, billing portal pages
- **Priya (Design)**: Checkout and portal mockups (Week 1 deliverable)