Briefs and reports

Briefs that hand work off

A brief is a baton in a relay: it exists so the next person can run without stopping to ask what you meant. The product ships two. Creative brief frames a creative ask with the audience, the message, and the constraints. Client brief captures what a client wants in a form your team can act on. Both read your brand, research, and strategy, so the brief shows up already grounded in the project instead of blank. Creative brief gets steady use in real production, which is the best sign a document is pulling its weight: teams actually pass it to each other.

Reports that answer a question

Report is the flexible one. Custom Report lets the engine choose its own sections to fit the brief. Board update and QBR are the fixed structure versions for when you need a shape people already expect. Write the brief as the exact question the report has to answer, and let the context filter decide which facts it reads.

The context filter does the real work

For a performance report, set the filter to Performance so the engine pulls the numbers and nothing else. For a quarterly review that has to touch everything, use Full audit. That one setting is the difference between a report that stays on subject and one that drifts.

Keep the loop tight

Treat these as living documents. Generate, edit in place, export, and re run when the project moves on. A brief written against last quarter's positioning is worse than no brief at all, because it reads as current when it is not.