<!-- PM-Skills | https://github.com/product-on-purpose/pm-skills | Apache 2.0 -->

Design Sprint Brief

Produce the brief that aligns the team on challenge, sprint questions, participants, customer recruiting, prototype medium, interview format, logistics, and success criteria before Monday begins. A well-built brief prevents Monday morning from opening with re-litigation of "what are we testing this week?"; a missing or vague brief almost guarantees it.

Family contract: site/src/content/docs/reference/skill-families/design-sprint-skills-contract.md. This skill is a member of design-sprint-skills.

When to Use

• The readiness verdict from tool-design-sprint-readiness is Go (or Conditional Go with preconditions cleared).
• The sprint has dates blocked on calendars and you need the artifact that names what the sprint is for.
• The team has customer recruiting active and you need to commit a recruiting plan, honorarium budget, and Friday schedule before recruiting closes.
• A skeptical exec wants to know "what is the team doing for five days plus customer cost?" and you need an answer that fits on two pages.

When NOT to Use

• The sprint has already started. The brief is a prep artifact, not an in-sprint deliverable. If Monday is happening, run tool-design-sprint-map-and-target instead.
• The readiness verdict is Wait. The brief cannot fix an unready team; close the preconditions first, then re-run readiness, then invoke this skill.
• The team wants a stakeholder strategy document. The brief is internal prep, not an external deliverable. If a stakeholder document is needed, that is a downstream artifact (the Friday scorecard or the next-step memo).
• Customer recruiting has not started. The brief locks the recruiting plan but cannot replace the recruiter. If no recruiter is named, go back to readiness Wait verdict.

What This Skill Produces