Long is fine, vague is not
Five sentences about how the work flows beat one sentence with five features in it. Length is not the problem; abstraction is.
TUTORIALS / MAKING IT FIT
Describing what you need
This is the one skill the studio asks of you, and it is not a technical one. "Make me a CRM" produces something generic. Two sentences about how the work actually flows produce something that fits.
6 minutes
Reading time
Ten minutes of thinking
What you need
The studio
Where you do it
01 Step by step
Say how the work flows, not what to build
The instinct is to describe the software you imagine: a table here, a button there, a status field. That is guessing at the solution, and it hands the studio your guess instead of your problem.
Describe the work instead. Who does what, in what order, where it goes wrong now, and what you wish you could see. The software is the part the studio is good at.
01
Start with the volume
Thirty enquiries a week is a different system from three hundred. Numbers are the fastest way to say how serious something is, and they take four words.
02
Say who touches it
Two people answer enquiries, one person quotes, the owner sees everything. Who does what decides which screens exist and who is allowed on them.
03
Say where it currently breaks
"We lose track once a quote is sent." That sentence is worth a page of feature requests, because it tells the studio what the system is actually for.
04
Say what should happen, not how
"Nobody should be able to book two people into the same slot." Not "add a validation rule". Describe the outcome and the studio decides the mechanism.
05
Answer the questions it asks
It only asks the ones that change the answer. Every question you wave through is an assumption you will correct in a fortnight, and the correction costs more than the answer.
06
Correct with symptoms
When something is wrong, say what you saw: "the total is missing VAT", "the reminder went out the morning of, not the evening before". Symptoms are precise; instructions about how to fix it are usually a guess.
02 In your own words
The same request, badly and well
Neither column is technical. The right-hand one is simply someone describing their own business the way they would to a new member of staff on their first morning.
You do not need the vocabulary of software. You do need to say how the work actually flows.
WHAT YOU TYPE, AND WHAT COMES BACK
| Make me a CRM. | Something generic that fits nobody |
| Thirty enquiries a week, two of us answer them, and we lose track once a quote is sent. | A system built around the place it goes wrong |
| Add a status field. | A field, and a question about what it is for |
| I need to know which quotes have gone quiet for a week. | A screen that shows exactly those, without anyone maintaining it |
03 What to watch for
A
B
Include the awkward case
The exception you handle by hand every week — the deposit, the repeat customer, the job that spans two months — is usually the thing that decides whether the system fits.
C
Do not design the screens
If you specify the layout you get your layout, including the parts that were only ever a guess. Say what you need to see and let the studio arrange it.
04 Where to go next
READ NEXT
Your first change — the loop this feeds, and what a sentence turns into.
Have it built for you — if you would rather someone sat down and drew this out of you.