Apps fail for a lot of reasons. Markets shift, teams change, competitors move faster. But one thing quietly sets a lot of projects up to overspend and underdeliver: a weak brief. It does not kill the product on its own, but it makes every bad decision easier and every fix more expensive.
At Pixelfield we work across app development UK and web development London. We see briefs from founders, scaleups and big brands before other app development companies ever touch them. The same pattern keeps showing up: missing context, fuzzy goals, no clear user, and a feature list that reads like a shopping cart.
A decent brief is not there to guarantee success. It is there to stop obvious waste. In a couple of pages, it should answer:
- Who you are and what you actually do
- What the product is and why anyone should care
- What stage the business is in and how it makes money
- Who the core users are and which KPIs matter
- What success looks like in numbers
- What constraints, risks or no go zones exist
You do not need to dictate tech stack or architecture. That is what app development companies are for. But if your team has zero clarity on audience, goals or business model, then any estimate on cost or timeline is just a dressed up guess.
You can start stupid simple. One honest line like:
“We run a pizza chain, phone orders are chaos, we need faster digital ordering.”
That is already more useful than a 20 page deck that tries to sound clever and says nothing real. From there, you refine the brief with product, design and engineering until it is tight enough to guide decisions.
When we get a messy brief, the first move is not to make it look pretty. It is to strip it down. Keep the hard facts. Mark every assumption. Push back on anything that smells like “we just thought it would be cool”. If all you have is a feature wishlist and no defined target user, the next step is a short validation sprint, not full build.
For live products, internal opinions are background noise. What matters is behavior. Where people drop off. Which screens crawl. Where onboarding hurts. What flows confuse users. If there is no clear problem and no metric to move, then throwing more budget at development is just setting fire to it.
Pixelfield sits in the overlap of app development UK and web development London. We combine product strategy, UX and engineering under one roof. Our job is not just to write code. It is to challenge the brief, cut the waste and make sure the money you spend actually moves the needle. If you want a team that will question your plan instead of quietly burning through it, that is where we start. UtdPlug
