When a project drifts — endless revisions, vague feedback, a final result nobody is quite happy with — it's tempting to blame the execution. In our experience it's almost always traceable to the first week, when everyone agreed on a goal that was never actually specific enough to agree on.
The questions that do the heavy lifting
- Who is this for — not a demographic, a person with a problem and a moment.
- What do they currently believe, and what do we need them to believe instead?
- What is the single action that counts as success?
- Where will this actually be seen — the phone, the hoarding, the feed, the shelf?
- What would make us call this a failure in three months?
That last one is the most useful and the most avoided. A brief that can't be failed can't be judged, and a project that can't be judged will be revised forever on taste alone.
'Make it pop' is not feedback. It's the sound of a brief that never got written.
Vague feedback is a symptom, not the disease
When a client says 'I don't love it' and can't say why, they're usually not being difficult. They're measuring the work against a target that was never made explicit, so the only vocabulary available is preference.
Write the target down at the start and feedback changes character entirely. It stops being 'I'd have used blue' and becomes 'this doesn't get a first-time visitor to the enquiry form.' That's a note you can actually design against.
Spend the time up front
A week spent getting the brief genuinely sharp will save a month of circling. It's the least glamorous part of the process and the only part that reliably determines the outcome.