Lesson 3: The Five Sentence Brief
Lesson 3: The Five Sentence Brief
Module 6, Lesson 3 of 3. About 11 minutes.
Orientation
You now have a readiness position and three sequenced actions. Neither will get you a decision on its own, because the person who needs to decide is rarely the person who has time to read either in full. What they can act on is five sentences. This lesson is about writing those five sentences so that nothing important is lost in the compression, and nothing unearned is smuggled in to make the position sound tidier than it is.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
- M6-O5Brief a decision maker on your position in five sentences.
Five Sentences, Five Jobs
Each sentence in the brief does one job, and the discipline is refusing to let any sentence do two.
Sentence one: what the product is, and what regime touches it. Name the product plainly and name the regulatory territory it sits in, without pretending more certainty than exists. If the product spans more than one regime, as most real products do, say so in one clause rather than splitting it into a paragraph.
Sentence two: what we know. The strongest, most defensible facts from your readiness position. Not everything you found, the load-bearing facts: the ones a decision would actually turn on.
Sentence three: what we do not know. Your single biggest data gap, stated with the evidence behind it, not softened into a general worry. This is the sentence people are most tempted to weaken, and it is the one the whole brief depends on being honest.
Sentence four: what we will do next, and by when. The first of your three sequenced actions, with an owner and a timeframe. Not all three actions: naming three dilutes the ask and gives the reader three things to push back on instead of one to approve.
Sentence five: what we need decided. The actual decision you are asking for. Budget, a named owner, permission to approach a supplier, or a green light to proceed to the next action. If this sentence is missing, the brief is a report, not a brief, and it will be filed rather than acted on.
The common misreading is to treat a five sentence brief as a summary of a longer document, and to try to compress everything into it. It is not a summary. It is a different artefact with a different job: forcing a decision. A summary that mentions everything and asks for nothing gets read and set aside. A brief that says what is known, what is not, what happens next and what is needed gets a yes or a no, which is the actual point of writing it.
Read these two sections. They cover what an executive sponsor needs to be able to say without reading a slide, and how a roadmap gets framed for people who will not read the whole document. Both are the register this brief is written in.
Read: How Should Organisations Prepare for Digital Product Passports? (15 min read)
Sections that carry this lesson:
- Preparing Internal Teams
- Building a Roadmap
The article is the source of record. Where this lesson and the article differ, the article is correct.
The Aurelia S2 is a cordless power tool whose housing, battery pack and textile strap sit in different, only partly settled regulatory conversations. We know the trimmer has a working QR pilot that resolves correctly, and that no attribute in our systems currently has a single named owner. Our biggest gap is data: three systems hold three conflicting identifiers for the same product, and battery composition data has never been requested from the contract manufacturer who actually holds it. In the next six weeks, product data management will reconcile the three identifiers to one agreed model-level identifier, with a named owner assigned. We need a decision to fund the identifier reconciliation work and to name that owner by the end of this month.
Notice what this brief does not contain: no article numbers, no dates for external deadlines beyond the internal six weeks committed to, no claim that the S2 programme is on track. It says what is known, names the one gap that matters most, commits to one action with a date, and asks for one decision. A reader could approve or reject it in the time it takes to read it once.
Using your readiness position from Lesson 1 and your sequenced actions from Lesson 2, write the five sentences for your own product: what it is and what regime touches it, what you know, what you do not, what you will do next and by when, and what you need decided. Read it aloud once. If it takes longer than forty-five seconds to say, a sentence is doing two jobs and needs splitting or cutting.
Knowledge Check
4 questions. Feedback is immediate, nothing is graded, and this does not gate your progress.
Takeaways
- Each of the five sentences does exactly one job: product and regime, what is known, what is not, next action and date, decision needed.
- Naming only the first sequenced action, not all three, keeps the ask singular.
- The gap sentence must stay specific and evidenced, never softened into general caution.
- A brief without a stated decision is a report, and reports get filed rather than acted on.
If you remember one thing: a brief that asks for nothing will be read once and forgotten.
Sources
How Should Organisations Prepare for Digital Product Passports?, sections Preparing Internal Teams and Building a Roadmap.
Module 6 · Lesson 3 of 3
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