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# Lesson 3: The Five Sentence Brief

> Academy Foundations Module 6 Lesson 3: compressing a readiness position and a sequenced plan into a five sentence brief a decision maker can act on.

**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

## 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.

#### [How Should Organisations Prepare for Digital Product Passports?](/docs/knowledge-base/implementation/how-should-organisations-prepare-for-digital-product-passports)

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.

#### The Aurelia S2 five sentence brief

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.

#### Write your own five sentence brief

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

## 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?](/docs/knowledge-base/implementation/how-should-organisations-prepare-for-digital-product-passports),
sections Preparing Internal Teams and Building a Roadmap.

## Related Docs

* [Module 6 assessment](/docs/academy/foundations/module-6/assessment)
* [Lesson 2: Sequencing the First Three Actions](/docs/academy/foundations/module-6/lesson-2)
* [How Should Organisations Prepare for Digital Product Passports?](/docs/knowledge-base/implementation/how-should-organisations-prepare-for-digital-product-passports)
* [Module 6 overview](/docs/academy/foundations/module-6)