Write your brief
A brief is the written proposal you supply before the room opens: the plan you want put under pressure. It is not a prompt. The personas read it first, so what you write here is what they arrive already hostile to. A session that starts from a written proposal is markedly better than a cold start. That is our own internal observation rather than a measurement, and no real human session has taken place to measure it against.
Not yet produced
A picture of the screen where you write the brief. There is no screen to photograph yet. The fields and their order are written out below instead.
What a good brief contains
01
What you are proposing
The decision itself, in one paragraph. Not the background, not the history, and not what you have already ruled out. The room argues about a decision, so give it one.
02
What it costs, and over what period
Money, headcount and time. A figure you are willing to defend out loud, because the first persona will ask who measured it.
03
What you are assuming
The assumption carrying the most weight. This is the one two personas will price differently, and that disagreement is the thing you came for.
04
What would make it fail
The failure you would call most likely. Writing it down yourself is what stops the room spending 45 minutes discovering it.
A worked brief, in full
A worked example, written for this page
What we are proposing
Replace the free tier with a money back guarantee on the first session, and drop the card requirement at sign up. Ship it before the pricing page is published.
What it costs, and over what period
One engineer for three weeks, plus the delivered cost of every free session we then give away, over the first two quarters.
What we are assuming
That a product whose value takes ten minutes to appear cannot be judged in one, and that the people who run a first session keep the plan at a rate that pays for the ones who take the guarantee.
What would make it fail
The delivered cost per session turns out to be high enough that free sessions outrun the conversion, and we find out after the page is public rather than before.
That control is not built. Filling the field below in one press needs a script this build does not ship, so it is disabled rather than live and silent, and the example above can be copied by hand in the meantime.
That brief is four paragraphs and it names a number, an assumption and a failure. It is enough for 3 personas to disagree with each other rather than to ask you for context for ten minutes.
Your brief
Two questions people ask before typing
I am going to describe things about my company that are not public. Should I?
A Tingvar session is a spoken record of what is wrong with your plan, which makes it one of the most sensitive artefacts your company could produce. So the honest advice is to read our data page before your first session rather than after it. What we control is where it goes, who can reach it and how fast you can destroy it, and all three are published. Names, unreleased figures and anything under an agreement with somebody else are worth redacting from the brief.
Will it invent numbers about my business?
A Tingvar persona once turned the misheard phrase "turns in" into a confident objection about 15 % monthly churn that had never been said. We publish this because a room whose value is pressure-testing your numbers, and which invents numbers, is worse than no room at all. The personas argue from the brief you write and from what you say, and they cannot see your accounts or anything you have not told them. If a number sounds wrong, say so out loud.