Skip to content

How to intake an external brief into a product brief

You have an email thread, a stakeholder message, a Linear issue, or a verbal sketch — unstructured input that describes multi-feature work. The author-brief skill turns that input into a DoR-compliant product brief file, elicits any missing gate fields in a short conversation, and queues the brief so workspace-status surfaces it immediately.

Is author-brief the right entry point?

Situation Skill to invoke
You have unstructured external input (email, stakeholder message, Linear issue, verbal sketch) and need to draft a brief first author-brief
You already have a formed multi-feature brief and need to decompose it into specs receive-brief
You are authoring a single feature spec directly, without a brief new-spec

The tell for author-brief is unstructured input that is not yet a brief — the skill does the drafting. If the brief already exists as a well-formed file, go straight to receive-brief.

Before you start

You need:

  • The core pack installed in your target repo.
  • Any unstructured input — a pasted email, issue body, message, or verbal description. It does not need to be complete or well-formatted.
  • No existing brief file at docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md (the skill checks for a slug collision before writing).

Steps

  1. Invoke the skill with whatever you have. Paste the email, message, or issue text, or describe the work verbally. The skill accepts partial or messy input — it extracts what signal is there and asks for what is missing.

  2. The skill names what it found and what is missing. It scans the input for DoR fields already present — Outcome, Appetite, Rabbit holes — and tells you which are present and which are absent. For example: "I found an Outcome but no Appetite and no Rabbit holes."

  3. Answer the elicitation for missing fields.

  4. Outcome is required. If the input contains no clear outcome, the skill asks for it before proceeding — it will not fabricate one.
  5. Appetite gets a default if absent. Confirm or correct it.

  6. Rabbit holes need ≥1 entry for the DoR gate. The skill asks you to name at least one design trap or out-of-bounds exploration before proceeding.

  7. Confirm the slug. The skill proposes a kebab-case slug that becomes the filename (docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md). Confirm or correct it. If a file already exists at that path, the skill stops and prompts you before writing.

  8. Brief file created and queued in workspace.toml. The skill writes docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md with Status: Draft and stages it. Then it handles the workspace.toml queue:

  9. Happy path: the brief's path is appended to the active initiative's brief_queue.draft list.
  10. workspace.toml absent, unparseable, or has no active initiative with a brief_queue: the file is created only. The skill emits a named diagnostic with the manual step to add the path yourself.

  11. Multiple active initiatives: the skill asks which initiative's queue the brief joins. It does not guess.

  12. Brief is queued as draft. The skill confirms the brief is at docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md and tells you to run receive-brief next to decompose it into specs.

What author-brief does and does not do

author-brief stops at draft — it creates the file and elicits the DoR fields but does not decompose the brief into specs. Use receive-brief for that.

Next step

When you are ready to decompose the brief into specs and mark it Ready, run receive-brief — see Receive a product brief and decompose it into specs.