The brief that changed how we work — and the lessons learned
A retrospective on our most challenging client engagement, and the process improvements that came from pushing through it.
Alex Mercer
Creative Director
Process
7
minutes
Three years ago we took on a project with an unusually vague brief, an unusually tight deadline, and an unusually senior stakeholder group with no shared opinion on what "good" looked like. We said yes anyway, because the work was interesting and the client was promising. In hindsight, that's exactly the combination that should have made us slow down.
Where it started to unravel
By week three, we'd produced three full creative directions, each approved enthusiastically by a different stakeholder and rejected just as enthusiastically by another. Nobody was lying to us. They simply hadn't aligned internally before bringing us in, and we hadn't forced that alignment before starting design work.
We kept designing anyway, assuming consensus would emerge naturally. It didn't. It rarely does once visuals are already on the table — at that point, people argue about preference, not strategy.
What we changed
We now require a structured alignment session before any creative work begins — not a kickoff call, a working session where stakeholders commit, in writing, to a single point of view on positioning, audience, and tone. If they can't agree in that room, we don't proceed to design. We help them work it out first, because design can't resolve a strategic disagreement; it can only dress it up temporarily.
This single change has done more for our project success rate than any improvement to our actual design process. It sounds almost too simple to matter. It matters enormously.
The harder lesson
The uncomfortable part of this story isn't the client's lack of alignment — it's that we knew, intuitively, three weeks in, that something was structurally wrong, and we didn't say so clearly enough, soon enough. We wanted to be accommodating. Accommodating, it turns out, isn't always helpful.
Now, if we sense the brief is shakier than it looks, we say so on day one. Clients respect it more than we expected. Nobody hires a studio hoping to be told what they want to hear.
