Sample Pilot Decision Brief
StrategyMap Decision Sprint
A fictional, public-safe example showing what the written brief from a Decision Sprint session looks like.
Prepared for: Northstar Studio (fictional)
Note: This is a fictional example built from Northstar Studio, the same fictional business used in the sample free report. It is provided to show the brief’s structure — it is not a real client, and no figure in it is a verified or guaranteed result.
1. Which single workflow should be tested first?
Client Intake Routing — ranked first in Northstar Studio's free StrategyMap report (Impact 5/5, Implementation Ease 4/5, low complexity, low risk). It was chosen because it sits at the start of every project and touches every other recurring task downstream of it.
2. What is the current workflow and where does it fail?
New client details arrive through inconsistent email threads and a mix of two different intake forms. The founder or a project lead manually re-types the same information into the project management tool to set up a new project, then creates the folder structure and starting documents by hand.
Failure points identified in the session: required fields (project scope, budget range, key contact) are sometimes missing entirely; folder naming drifts between team members; and setup for a new project can sit for a day or more when the founder is busy, since no one else is authorized to start it.
3. What outcome would make a pilot worth continuing?
The team set its own working target for the pilot window, not a figure StrategyMap verified or guaranteed: fewer new projects missing a required field at handoff, and project setup starting the same business day the client submits intake instead of waiting on one person's availability.
These are the client's own stated success signals for their 30-day test, recorded here as the target they chose — not a result StrategyMap AI is claiming to have produced.
4. What should the proposed human-and-system workflow look like?
One structured intake form replaces the two existing forms and email-based intake, with the required fields (scope, budget range, key contact, project type) marked mandatory before submission.
Submission automatically creates the project folder and starting document set using the existing naming convention, and assigns the project to the appropriate team lead based on project type.
The team lead reviews and confirms the auto-created setup before any client-facing work begins — the human review step stays in place. Nothing about the client relationship or the actual project work is automated.
5. Which assumptions, access questions, and risks must be resolved before implementation?
Whether the intake form tool can trigger the project management tool's folder-creation step directly, or whether a middle step (and which one) is needed to connect them.
Who is authorized to edit the mandatory-field list once the form is live, and how exceptions get handled when a client genuinely can't supply a required field yet.
Confirming the new form doesn't drop any field the invoicing step downstream currently depends on.
None of these were verified during the session — they're the specific, named discovery questions that have to be answered before build work starts, not something the brief already assumes will work.
6. What are the next actions, owners, and decision points for a 30-day pilot?
Week 1: Team lead confirms the mandatory-field list; founder resolves the tool-connection question above before any building starts.
Weeks 2–3: New intake form runs in parallel with the current process on new projects only, so nothing already in flight is disrupted.
Week 4: Team lead compares missing-field rate and same-day setup rate against the target set in question 3, and reports back to the founder.
Decision point, end of week 4: go (replace the old intake process), not-yet (extend the parallel run — most likely if the tool-connection question isn't resolved in time), or no-go (the manual process turns out to work better than expected once measured directly).
What this brief is not
It is not a completed implementation, a guarantee of the stated outcome, or certification of security, privacy, legal, or compliance readiness. It supports one decision — go, no-go, or not-yet on a single 30-day pilot — and nothing beyond that scope. See the methodology page for the rules that govern every report and brief StrategyMap produces.