How to hire a digital product agency: what the brief should contain

Most digital projects that fail don't fail because of bad execution. They fail because the brief was wrong. Unclear expectations, missing context, no shared definition of success, and a budget locked in before the first conversation ever happened.

At Livewall, we work as a digital product agency on platforms, apps, and web applications for consumer brands. We see this pattern constantly: the vaguer the brief, the higher the chance of an expensive, grinding project that leaves everyone frustrated.

This article is a practical breakdown of what a good digital product brief contains. Use it to structure your own preparation, or send it to whoever is writing the brief on your side.

Start with the problem, not the solution

The most common issue in a brief is that a solution is already named before the problem has been defined. 'We want an app' or 'we want a platform' tells a digital product agency nothing about why, for whom, or what it needs to do.

A productive first agency conversation starts with:

• The problem or opportunity. What is not working today? What are users trying to do that isn't possible? Or: what commercial opportunity are you trying to capture?
• The users. Who are they? What do you already know about their behavior, their frustrations, their context?
• The business context. What kind of organisation are you? What are the commercial goals behind this project?

Only once an agency understands this can it make a meaningful proposal. Agencies that send a quote without asking these questions will build what you asked for, not what you need.

What a good brief should cover

1. Objective and success criteria

What should this product achieve? And how will you measure whether it works? 'More engagement' is not an objective. 'Two thousand active users in the first three months with at least forty percent retention' is.

Good KPIs are specific, measurable, and directly tied to in-product behavior. Define them before you approach a digital product agency, not after.

2. Users and their context

Who are you building this for? Describe the audience as concretely as possible. Age, device, digital literacy, context of use. A community platform for a sports federation is a different product to a loyalty app for a retail brand, even if they look similar on a spec sheet.

If you have existing user research, share it. If you don't, say so. A good agency will help you get it.

3. Scope and must-haves

What functionality is absolutely required for launch? What is nice-to-have? And what is explicitly out of scope?

This sounds obvious, but most scope disputes during a project trace back to a brief that never worked this out. Write it down. Be specific.

4. Technical context

What already exists? CRM, payment infrastructure, loyalty engine, identity provider? Which systems need to integrate? Are there existing data stores or APIs?

A digital product agency cannot make a realistic estimate without knowing what technical landscape it is entering.

5. Timeline and hard deadlines

Is there a launch date that cannot move? A campaign, an event, a contractual obligation? Be honest about this. An unrealistic timeline that surfaces later in a project always costs more than an honest conversation at the start.

Budget: say what you have

Many clients withhold their budget because they assume it will push the agency to inflate its quote. The opposite is true.

If an agency doesn't know what is available, it writes a proposal for an unknown number. That leads to proposals that don't fit, expectations that don't match, or a quote that looks acceptable but already plans for change requests later.

Good agencies adapt scope to budget, not budget to scope. They help you deploy your investment as efficiently as possible. But they can only do that when they know what is there.

If you don't want to give an exact number, give a range. But give something.

What a digital product agency needs from you to do great work

A brief is not a one-way document. It is the start of a working relationship. An agency that wants to do genuinely good work needs access to:

• Decision-makers. Not just the project manager, but the person who has authority over product decisions. Without access to decision-makers, projects slow down structurally.
• User insight. Qualitative research, analytics, support tickets, sales conversations. Anything you know about how your users actually behave.
• Existing systems and documentation. API docs, current architecture, known technical constraints.
• Room for their opinion. When you hire a digital product agency, you are also hiring their judgment. Agencies that only execute what the client specifies are more expensive than they look.

At Livewall, we believe the best digital products come from a shared ownership of the problem. That starts with a brief that makes it possible.

When is a brief good enough?

A brief does not need to be perfect. There will always be unknowns. But a good brief is honest about those unknowns.

'We don't yet know exactly which integrations are required' is a useful sentence in a brief. 'We need an app, please send a quote' is not.

The best first conversations are ones where the agency walks away saying: we understand the problem, we see the challenges, and we know what we still need to figure out. That is the goal of a good brief, and what a good digital product agency will do with that information.

Want to involve UX and product thinking already at the briefing stage? That is exactly when it delivers the most. The earlier an agency can influence problem framing and scope, the fewer corrections are needed later.

Livewall also offers MVP development as a way to test unknowns quickly before you scale up a full production team.